Wednesday, March 05, 2008

Information, What to do with Information?

For the first time in my life I have access to a 54Mbps internet connection everyday. Can you imagine how much information I have at the tips of my fingers? How much information I have to process every time I log on? I am supposed to be working on 3 separate papers right now. My brain goes off on tangents because of the abundance of information available - and the abundance of information I need to filter and process. I seriously feel my brain is going on overload. Either that or my neurons are depreciating. Probably both.

Before I came here, I may have had at most 300 PDFs on my computer. Now I probably have 3,000, if not more. Each time I do research, I log on and if you know where to look, you can have access to anything you need. The European Union alone has hundreds upon hundreds of policy documents freely downloadable online for the whole world to peruse.

Our government site has links to the different branches and offices. The POEA has a decent collection of official data online. The PIDS has also been an invaluable source. Congress also has a nifty website, and you can search bills passed by topic or who authored them. This was information not readily available to just anyone 10 years ago. Now anyone who cares to go to an internet cafe and cough up P20/hour will be able to access them. When you look up information and you're not sure about a word or concept, you just go to Wikipedia!

There will be 24 million internet users in the Philippines this year. Up by ten million from two years ago. How many will there be by 2010? 34 million? More? We Filipinos certainly love our media. We are wired to the teeth. And because most of us are Anglophone, we can manage to wade through cyberspace. Now, if only we would devote some of our net time not playing online games. Imagine the possibilities.

Read also:

Social (Cyber)spaces

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

OMG does this mean 3 thought-provoking caffeine posts per hour?

And I am always curious about the stats of Philippine online gamer. I, uh, I hate online gamers, though I'm a videogamer myself.

cvj said...

Sparks, would you know if an individual can subscribe to JSTOR and similar repositories of papers? It comes up often in google searches but i'm only able to view the abstracts.

sparks said...

Night,

No, I'm working on school papers :)

Chuck,

Jstor has mostly old stuff, if you're interested in historical data. EBSCO is actually more up to date. You can get access as individual through: http://www.elib.gov.ph/

Heaps and heaps of freebies (economics) here:
http://ideas.repec.org/

You can also check the publishing houses, some actually give journal articles and book chapters for free! See:

http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/

And then there are podcasts/vodcasts on iTunes university.

Ah, I'm such an info ho :)

cvj said...

Thanks Sparks!