I made a graphic that shows how I think information moves through our society today. At the top is the discovery, on its way to becoming common knowledge at the bottom it has to move through several phases. Each phase is an ecological niche that is occupied by a different species. Each creature on the list feeds off of information and uses it for energy to do work. Without information it dies. Take any topic and you can trace its path through the information ecosystem. Global Climate Change, Health Care, Peak Oil, Asbestos concerns, Water on the moon, etc…
A lot of people may question the placement I gave to Social Media, which I just called “Status Updates”. Social Networks are the current darlings of the internet and a lot people rave about the information they learn from the random utterances of their social network. Be that as it may, the information is mainly in the form of links to one of the above sources, so it can’t be higher in chain since it requires the others to exist so I place it just further down and to the right (more popular). The placement of spam above political speeches was done for one reason – by the time a political speech contains a piece of information, not only does everyone already know it (a politician will only say something he thinks you already know and agree with), but by the time he says it, there has been spam about it for a long, long time.
Let me know if I left out any major categories or if you think I should swap the order of anything in the comments.
