Information Anxiety 2 (Hayden/Que) [Paperback]

Some of Wurman's opinions sound a little disingenuous in light of his own online work: a chapter which contains the standard complaints about high-bandwidth sites that don't offer useful information (useless plug-ins, over-reliance on graphics instead of text, etc) also points us to Wurman's Understanding USA web site, which starts with a Flash intro animation, is built almost solely from graphics, and even uses a Java applet in its Site Map.

It's too bad, but this really comes across as an entry-level text about presenting information in multiple contexts, including online. There's more about management style than I'd care for, and less about what kinds of visual presentations support what kinds of information. It's admirably up-to-date: it's impressive that he managed to include the Florida ballot in a book printed in November 2000, for example.

Finally, I could have done without the frequent and lengthy references to TED, Wurman's own annual conference of designers, businesspeople, and entertainers. The thing sounds like fun, but in the context of the book, the relevance is rarely clear.

My guess is that this project was conceived as a quickie update to the original Information Anxiety to take advantage of Internet mania, and as such much of the work was delegated to others, but without sufficient review and editing. (There are too many editing mistakes to list here, but suffice it to say that probably few books have a misspelling in the Table Of Contents as this one does -- "Informatgion" instead of "Information".)

RSW tells us that it's important to always start off with what the question is. Problem is, he doesn't follow his own advice in that book. He careens uncontrollably from gushy predictions about the future, to cataclysmic warnings of information deluge, to superficial suggestions on software and web design, to facile pop management advice, The only thread connecting all these disjointed pieces is that he strictly limits himself to talking about how important something or other is, without ever giving specific advice about how to approach it.

I am personally interested in the field of localization and globalization. So naturally I was curious as to what insight RSW brought to this area. What I found was a single, lonely page on the topic, with a few lines of simplistic patter, and a strange, unexplained diagram of various fountain pens with country names associated with each.

I am also interested in the combination of text and graphics to present information and in fact bought this book thinking it might have some insights in that regards. So I was quite happy to see in the Table of Contents a section Design in the Digital Age, summarized as "In this Digital Age we need to focus on the connections among all design elements: medium, words, pictures, and sound." Alas, true to form, all the section in question does is repeat that we need to focus on this, with no clue as how we might actually do that, nor a single example in sight. To get an idea of the poor editing quality of this book, consider the following paragraph from this section:

"Where words meet pictures meet sound creates understanding. Are you a value-based organization? A service-based organization? A quality-based organization? Are you all three? We test communication by conveying a message and having the recipient understand it, be interested in it, and remember it. Any other measure is unimportant and invalid." Does anyone else wonder how the stuff about organizations fits in here? It's just random cut-and-paste content that accidentally found its way here, never to receive the benefit of the editor's pen. Signs of rampant cut-and-pasting abound throughout the book.

Although not really the fault of the author(s), the book is also seriously dated, having come out while there was still some degree of dot-com mania going on (although the peak was passed). So you can read this book on sort of an archaeological level, to recall all the bizarre things people were saying back in those heady days. Internet refrigerators, anyone?

I probably don't need to summarize; let me simply say you are best off spending your time and money on virtually any book on this topic besides this one.