Information was supposed to be completely democratized

Hello everyone.

Today, I would like to think about what the information gap in regional areas really is.

When people hear the term information gap, or digital divide, many might feel it sounds like something from the past, back when the internet was just starting to become widespread.

Today's era is different.

The internet is everywhere.

Everyone has a smartphone.

If you open social media, news from all over the world flows in.

An infinite number of videos are uploaded to YouTube.

And now, even generative AI like ChatGPT is in the palm of our hands.

Whether you are in the heart of Tokyo, deep in the mountains of Hokkaido, or by the coast in Nagasaki, as long as you have a connection, you can access the exact same information.

You can find out what fashion is trending in New York in an instant just by searching.

You can also see the latest menu of a three-star restaurant in Paris in vivid photos.

You can even watch lectures by brilliant professors from Harvard or Stanford, with translations, while lying on your sofa at home.

When you think about it calmly, it really is an incredible era.

If we look back just 20 years, we are living in a world that was almost like science fiction.

In the past, the act of possessing information itself had tremendous value.

To gain specialized knowledge, you had to buy expensive professional journals, go directly to meet experts who were knowledgeable in that field, or actually travel to foreign countries.

It required time, money, and physical stamina.

However, now, much of that is contained within the thin screen of a smartphone.

In other words, the gateway to information has been completely democratized.

If that is the case, has the information gap between rural and urban areas finally disappeared?

Are we now able to have the same opportunities and view the world in the same way, regardless of where we live?

I believe that, on the contrary, something a little different is starting to happen.

The era when inequality was born from a lack of information is over.

It is precisely because there is too much information, and because of how cleverly it is delivered, that a new, different kind of inequality is quietly emerging.

This is both very interesting and a little bit frightening.

#DemocratizationOfInformation #TheCurrentStateOfTheDigitalDivide #GapBetweenRuralAndUrbanAreas #InformationGatheringInTheAIEra #BenefitsOfTheInternet

We are only learning about what we want to know

When the internet first appeared, many people hoped that it would allow us to connect to all kinds of information from around the world.

Of course, that dream has come true.

However, having a system that can connect to information from all over the world and humans actually looking at that information are two completely different things.

If you think about it honestly, you will realize that we surprisingly only look at things we are interested in.

People who like baseball watch baseball news every day.

People who like wine only follow articles about wine regions and new labels.

People interested in investing watch videos explaining stock prices enthusiastically.

Before you know it, the smartphones of people who like cats are filled with videos of cute cats.

In itself, this is very peaceful and happy.

Since you are surrounded by things you like, there is no stress at all.

However, the problem starts here.

If we take the YouTube that you watch every day as an example, I think it is very easy to understand.

The YouTube home screen is a space customized just for you.

The system analyzes your viewing and search history to constantly recommend videos it thinks you will like.

In other words, if you watch a few wine videos, new wine videos will appear one after another.

If you watch NBA highlights, basketball videos will line up the next day as well.

If you watch cooking recipe videos, channels by professional chefs will be recommended.

It is truly convenient.

It is frighteningly convenient.

The moment you open YouTube when you are tired at night,

you might find yourself thinking,

"It really understands my current mood."

It is as if you have an excellent secretary who understands your preferences even better than you do.

However, that overwhelming convenience has one unavoidable weakness.

That is, it becomes extremely difficult to encounter things that are far from your interests.

#Personalization #RecommendationAlgorithm #InformationGatheringBias #Interests #YouTubeRecommendationFeature

The invisible walls of echo chambers and filter bubbles

Let me touch on some technical terms for a moment.

There is a term called an "echo chamber."

To put it very simply, this is a state where, by being surrounded only by people who have similar thoughts to your own, the same opinions are echoed over and over again, and your own thoughts become increasingly solidified.

If you shout in a closed cave,

"That's right"

"That's right."

"That's right."

It's like the image of your own voice echoing back to you.

It's a slightly scary phenomenon because you end up under the illusion that the people around you are agreeing with you.

There is a similar term called a "filter bubble."

This refers to a state where, due to platform algorithms and the like, only information that matches your preferences is preferentially displayed, causing other information to be shut out and leaving you wrapped in an invisible bubble.

Strictly speaking, these two are slightly different phenomena, but there is an important point common to both.

That is the tendency to fall under the illusion that "the world I see is the entire world."

To solve this problem, those who develop recommendation systems are also making various efforts.

Since continuing to present only things similar to a user's past behavior reduces accidental encounters with the unknown, research is being conducted on how to intentionally create "serendipity" within the system.

Serendipity.

Another slightly difficult katakana word has appeared.

To put this very simply,

"I wasn't looking for it at all, but I unexpectedly encountered something interesting."

It refers to this kind of lucky coincidence.

In the coming era, I believe this feeling of having "stumbled upon something" will become incredibly important for living.

#EchoChamberPhenomenon #FilterBubble #Serendipity #ConfirmationBias #InformationImbalance

In the past, the "city itself" was the algorithm

Please try to imagine, just for a moment, the era before the internet.

For example, a large bookstore from the old days.

I went to buy a cookbook for tonight's dinner.

I found the book I was looking for, but when I happened to glance at the shelf next to it, I saw a travel book with a beautiful cover photo stacked flat, and for some reason, I felt drawn to pick it up.

As I flipped through the pages, I saw a photo of a small, nameless village in the south of Italy.

"Wow, there are such wonderful places in the world."

I felt moved.

And a few years later, I might actually end up traveling to Italy because I couldn't forget that photo.

When you think about it, this is a strange thing.

I didn't go to the bookstore from the start thinking,

"I'm going to research a village in Italy with a population of 3,000 in detail."

It was completely by chance.

The old CD shops were the same.

I went to buy a new CD from my favorite artist, but a song I didn't know happened to be playing in the store.

"I wonder who is singing this. It's really good."

I asked the clerk, and from there, I sometimes ended up getting hooked on a genre of music I had known nothing about.

The same kind of thing happens at my favorite local pub.

I happened to talk to the person sitting next to me at the counter, and it turned out they worked in a completely different industry than mine.

Their stories about their work were incredibly interesting, and I learned that there are new worlds I didn't know about.

These events have one clear thing in common.

I didn't search for them myself.

It was not something I sought out.

It was not recommended by AI either.

I did not choose it intentionally myself, either.

The information came flying at me on its own, from the other side.

Come to think of it, there used to be many events like this "noise" in the cities of the past.

I walk toward the station.

I get on a crowded train.

I enter a large bookstore.

I walk through a department store overflowing with people.

I look at posters in a movie theater lobby.

I enter a noisy restaurant.

I go to a company where there are all kinds of people.

I meet people I did not expect to see.

In all of those processes, a massive amount of information I was not interested in, signs I was not conscious of, and even snippets of other people's conversations entered my eyes and ears.

In other words, in the past, the space of the "city" itself was a huge and slightly meddlesome information-providing device.

#ChanceEncounters #ValueOfOffline #CharmOfCityWalking #ImportanceOfNoise #UnexpectedHarmony

Regional disparity is not about "whether you can search"

From here, we finally connect to the topic of regional areas.

Recently, I often hear opinions like this.

"Since the internet connects everywhere now, even if you live in a regional area, talking about an information gap is just an excuse."

I think that is half true.

As long as you have the motivation, you can obtain as much knowledge as you want.

However, I have significant doubts about the other half.

This is because, while it is true that the gap in 'information available through search' has completely narrowed between cities and rural areas.

I believe that a decisive difference still exists regarding 'information before you search'.

Human beings cannot search for things they do not know exist.

This is a simple but extremely important fact.

For example, suppose you have absolutely no knowledge of the term 'natural wine' or that such a production method even exists.

In that state, opening Google and searching for,

'natural wine beginner recommendations'

is physically impossible.

Since you don't know it exists, you cannot formulate a question.

The same can be said no matter how excellent the generative AI you are dealing with is.

Even if ChatGPT possessed all the knowledge in the world, if you don't even know the concept exists, you cannot provide the appropriate prompt (instruction).

In other words, the modern information gap is not just about,

'whether or not you have an environment where you can look up answers'.

It is not just that.

'Whether or not you even know what kind of questions exist in the world'

is also a gap in the variety of questions.

I believe this difference is significant enough to influence one's life.

#LimitsOfSearch #HowToUseGenerativeAI #UnknownKnowledge #AbilityToFormulateQuestions #AILiteracy

The reality that the sample size of "coincidence" tends to be smaller in rural areas

Of course, please do not misunderstand; there is a mountain of wonderful information in rural areas as well.

I am by no means thinking of rural areas as being below cities.

Rather, when it comes to primary information rooted in that land, rural areas are overwhelmingly stronger.

If you want to know how to identify delicious fish, the local fishermen know best.

If you want to know how to grow vegetables that suit the local climate, the farmers know.

When it comes to local history and culture, the elderly who have lived there for decades have surprisingly vivid and detailed stories.

Valuable stories that would never appear no matter how much you search on Google are commonly found in rural areas.

This is an incredibly valuable asset.

However, life in rural areas also has another side.

When walking through the busy streets of a giant city, the number of times you are forced to encounter values different from your own is overwhelmingly higher.

People of various nationalities are walking around.

There are young people with eccentric fashion you have never seen before.

There are mysterious companies where you don't know what they do.

There are new restaurants with concepts that are too sharp.

There are huge advertisements with incomprehensible designs.

Languages you have never heard are flying about.

At the table next to you in a cafe, people from the IT industry who have nothing to do with you are passionately discussing things in mysterious jargon.

You don't need to understand all of these one by one.

What is important is that the fact that "there is a world different from your own" is forced into your field of vision.

On the other hand, in rural areas, the population is naturally smaller, and the commercial sphere is also smaller.

In a car-dependent society, travel tends to be door-to-door.

Public transportation options are also limited.

The places you can physically go, the new people you can meet, and the types of events you can attend on weekends tend to be fewer compared to urban areas.

So, what happens then?

Your living sphere becomes more likely to be fixed little by little.

Every day, you commute between home and work by car.

You go to the supermarket with the usual selection.

You go to the convenience store where the usual clerk is.

You talk to the usual members at your workplace.

You go home and open your smartphone as usual.

And there, too, the algorithm carefully delivers your "usual interests".

When you think about it, this is a quite powerful loop.

Your real-life sphere is fixed within a limited range.

Your digital sphere is also optimized for your own preferences.

Before you know it, even though the world is incredibly vast, the range you see can quietly and comfortably become narrower.

#RealityOfRuralLiving #DiversityOfValues #FixationOfCommunity #UrbanAndRural #EnvironmentalFactors

Information disparity gradually turns into "behavioral disparity"

This is what I am most concerned about when thinking about the information gap in rural areas.

If it were just a "difference in information" regarding whether you know something or not, it might not actually be such a big problem.

Because you can just look it up later when you need it.

However, that gap in information gradually transforms into a 'gap in action' over a long period of time.

For example, suppose a friend of your generation working in Tokyo decides to take the plunge and change jobs.

Unexpectedly, their annual income increased.

They started working completely remotely.

In their spare time, they also started a side job utilizing their strengths.

When you look around that friend's circle, there are many people working in similar ways.

Then, for that friend,

'I see, this kind of working style is actually quite common in the world'

becomes an obvious reality.

However, what if there isn't a single person around you who works in such a new way?

Even if you know about such working styles as 'knowledge' through internet news or social media,

'I wonder if such a convenient thing is really possible'

'That must only be for people with some special talent'

you end up putting a brake on it somewhere in your heart.

There is a completely different level of persuasiveness and sense of reality between knowing something through a screen as knowledge and seeing a real person actually doing it right in front of you.

I believe there is a fairly large, invisible wall here.

People cannot easily get up and take action based solely on 'possibilities' in their heads.

Only by seeing 'someone who has actually pulled it off' up close,

'Huh? Maybe I could do it too' can they finally think.

Sometimes, my heart is moved by this.

Suppose a young person working in a rural area secretly dreams of working abroad someday.

If they search, they can find endless information about overseas.

They can look up how to get a visa and find job listings.

There are also many vlogs by Japanese people struggling and succeeding abroad.

But even with all that, it is hard to take the first step.

However, if there is even one person among their senior colleagues or acquaintances who has actually worked abroad, the situation changes completely.

"How did you actually make the connections to go there?"

They can ask directly.

"In an environment where the language isn't spoken, how much English was necessary?"

They can ask.

"For the first month, weren't you anxious and scared?"

They can hear the honest truth.

Then, what was once a vague "dream" turns into a "plan" with concrete steps.

This difference is incredibly huge.

#ActionGap #CareerChoices #NewWaysOfWorking #ImportanceOfRoleModels #RuralCareers

The action gap eventually manifests as a "difference in confidence"

And I believe that this action gap, born from the information gap, may ultimately have a deep impact on a person's own "confidence."

When I talk to young people in rural areas, I sometimes hear words like these.

"I'm not really anything special anyway."

"I'll never be able to compete with the talented people anyway."

"Even if I try something new in a place like this, no one will pay any attention to me."

Of course, this is by no means true for all young people in rural areas.

It is not a simple dichotomy of having no confidence because you are from a rural area, or having confidence because you are from a city.

However, when I hear words like these, I think it is very dangerous to dismiss them simply as a "lack of personal ability" or "low motivation."

Perhaps it is not that they lack ability, but rather,

"the number of times they have seen someone actually succeed at a challenge"

is simply overwhelmingly small.

This is a difference in environment that cannot be helped by personal effort alone.

It is very difficult for people to suddenly choose a life they have never seen or heard of.

If your parents are ordinary company employees, your relatives are all company employees, and your close friends are all choosing the path to become company employees, then the future of becoming a company employee yourself is very easy to imagine.

On the other hand, if there is no one in your immediate environment who has started their own company, is a freelancer traveling around the world, is doing niche research at a university, or is making a living solely through art, then all of those professions just look like "the lives of special people on TV."

Even though, in reality, they might be able to choose those paths with enough effort.

But they are not recognized in their minds as realistic "options."

This is not because the person is lazy or lacks the ability.

It is simply that they have not seen "samples" of those ways of life right in front of them.

Rather than grouping this state under the term information gap,

"a gap in the resolution of possibilities"

I think calling it that hits closer to the essence.

#SelfEfficacy #ResolutionOfPossibilities #YouthChallenges #PowerOfEnvironment #Mindset

If you do not know your options, you cannot choose freely.

Let's change our perspective a little and use an easy-to-understand analogy.

For example, imagine you enter a restaurant you are visiting for the first time.

You are shown to your seat, but no one brings you a menu, no matter how long you wait.

Then a waiter comes over and asks with a smile,

"Now, what would you like to eat? Please feel free to order whatever you like."

This is incredibly difficult, isn't it?

Is there spicy curry?

Is there fresh fish sushi?

Is there handmade pasta?

To begin with, you don't even know what kind of cuisine this restaurant serves.

Life choices are somewhat similar to this.

We usually assume that we are "choosing our lives freely and entirely of our own will."

But in reality, we are only choosing from the menu of "known options" that we have perceived throughout our lives.

Suppose there is one person looking at a menu with 100 options, and another person looking at a menu with only 5.

Both of them believe that they have "freely chosen what they like."

But the breadth and richness of that freedom are completely different.

For the first time in human history, the internet has explosively increased the options written on this menu.

This is an undeniably wonderful achievement.

However, as I mentioned earlier, with the extreme development of algorithms, now,

"Five menu items you're guaranteed to love"

are now extracted and presented with incredibly high precision.

This is very convenient as it saves the trouble of having to worry about choices.

But it is too convenient.

Humans have become able to continue living in a small, comfortable, and pleasant world without any awareness that they are narrowing their own world.

Only information about people you like reaches you.

Opinions you don't want to see and news you dislike can be muted with a single swipe.

Videos you have even the slightest lack of interest in can be skipped immediately and will never be displayed again.

You can live by following only those who get along with you and affirm you.

To put it extremely, you can create a world that is like your own private miniature garden.

The comfort is undoubtedly the best.

No one will deny you.

However, the triggers for humans to truly grow or change their values often come from such "uncomfortable places" or "events that do not go as planned."

#FreedomOfChoice #UnconsciousBias #LifeChoices #InformationOptimization #BroadeningPerspectives

What regions need might not be new information, but "noise"

Here, I would like to think with a bit of lateral thinking.

What should be done to eliminate the information gap in regional areas and the resulting gap in actions?

Should we just deliver more of the latest information to regional areas?

I do not necessarily think so.

There is already enough information.

If anything, there is too much of it to process.

What we really need now is a mechanism that allows information we would never have chosen for ourselves to enter our lives unintentionally.

In other words, that is 'high-quality noise'.

Daring to meet people you would never normally meet.

Taking the plunge and going to places you would never normally go.

Daring to read books you would normally skip after just seeing the headline.

Dropping in on events you thought had nothing to do with you.

Listening to the struggles of people working in completely different industries.

Listening to the life experiences of someone 20 years your senior.

Having someone 20 years your junior teach you what they are passionate about.

Talking to foreigners who grew up in a different culture.

Just walking through the alleys of an unfamiliar town without looking at a map.

Going to a bookstore without a purpose and looking at the spines on every shelf.

I believe that these kinds of actions, which at first glance might seem 'inefficient' by modern standards, will become incredibly important from now on.

If you think only in terms of time performance (taipa), these are the worst possible actions.

You are wasting time.

If you have a goal, searching is overwhelmingly faster.

Having AI summarize it for you is faster.

Buying what is recommended on Amazon is faster.

However, when you optimize and streamline everything in life, there are things that inevitably get stripped away.

That is what we call a "coincidence."

And I believe that it is precisely from these uncalculated coincidences that encounters and ideas capable of dramatically changing one's life are born.

#QualityNoise #TheDownsideOfTimePerformance #TheLimitsOfEfficiency #TimePerformance #CrossIndustryExchange

The ability to "drift" may become more important than the ability to search

As generative AI continues to become smarter and more advanced in the future, the value of the "ability to quickly find answers" may gradually decrease.

This is because, as long as you ask a question, AI will be able to provide answers faster, more accurately, and to a much greater extent than any human.

Consequently, what will conversely increase in value from here on out is,

"What, in the first place, should I ask about?"

This is the power of that question.

And even before that,

"What do I feel doubt or discomfort about?"

This is the power of that sensibility.

In order to have new questions within yourself, you must inevitably touch upon things outside the world you already know.

Encountering something completely unknown and being surprised.

Feeling a sense of discomfort about something you took for granted.

"What is this? Why is it like this?"

Stopping in your tracks.

Only from there can high-quality "questions" to pose to AI be born.

Therefore, in the coming era, the ability to "drift" aimlessly through the vast ocean of information may become just as necessary as the "ability to search," such as typing quickly or being good at choosing search keywords.

It is the ability to walk while daring to get lost, without setting a rigid destination.

Sometimes, being a little inefficient is just right.

Suppose you are traveling and suddenly have an hour of free time.

At that moment, you could immediately take out your smartphone and use Google Maps to find a restaurant with a rating of 4.5 or higher that is guaranteed not to disappoint.

But sometimes, it is not a bad idea to put your smartphone in your pocket and just walk around aimlessly.

Try turning into an alley that smells interesting.

Gather the courage to enter an old, run-down shop where a local old man is drinking alone.

Of course, you might fail.

This is quite common.

You might be served food that tastes incredibly mediocre,

and you might regret it, thinking,

"Ah, I should have just listened to Google-sensei."

But after a few years, even that failure will become a funny experience.

Choosing to trust your own intuition rather than picking what an algorithm guarantees as safe actually has great significance in enriching your life.

#AbilityToDrift #QuestioningSkills #ArticulatingDiscomfort #TrustingIntuition #SkillsInTheAIEra

It is precisely because it is a rural area that there is a strength in being able to design serendipity.

Having said that, after reading this far,

some might be discouraged, thinking,

"Then, aren't rural areas, which lack environments where various people intersect, overwhelmingly at a disadvantage?"

However, I believe there is also the opposite possibility.

Rural areas have strengths that cities do not.

That means that the distance between people is short.

If you build a deep relationship of trust with one person, you will often find yourself connected to other interesting people in a chain reaction.

"If you're interested in that kind of thing, you should go meet that person in the next town over."

They will immediately meddle and introduce you.

From that person, you can easily connect to yet another new world.

In urban areas, there are too many people, so relationships tend to be thin and anonymous.

In rural areas, you can never beat cities in terms of the total population (number of people).

However, you can sometimes win in terms of the depth of relationships and the speed at which people connect.

In that case, you should make the most of the unique characteristics of that region.

What is really needed in rural areas is not to imitate Tokyo and create many similar flashy events.

I think it is to consciously design and create "places where people from completely different contexts unintentionally mix."

A chef and a rice farmer drinking sake at the same table.

A local high school student and a business owner over sixty having a serious business discussion.

A pole-and-line fisherman and a web designer thinking about local issues together.

An immigrant from abroad and a local grandmother talking about farm work.

A government official and a fun-loving college student arguing at an izakaya.

It would also be interesting if a generative AI expert who happened to be visiting home just wandered in, wouldn't it?

At first glance, they have nothing in common and no relationship.

That is exactly why it is good.

Rather than gathering 100 people from the same industry and with the same way of thinking for a meeting, gathering 10 people with completely different backgrounds for a casual chat can sometimes lead to new ideas that no one had ever thought of.

There is no need to force the closing of the information gap.

You must "mix" information, and people.

I believe this perspective of "how to mix in noise" will become quite important when considering future regional revitalization and community development.

#RegionalRevitalization #LocalCommunity #InterdisciplinaryFusion #OpenInnovation #RelatedPopulation

So,

So, today I have taken another look at what exactly the information gap in rural areas is, and how we should face it, even though it has become a bit long.

No longer,

"Rural areas are lagging behind because they lack information"

I believe that the old-fashioned explanation of this is no longer sufficient to correctly grasp the current situation.

Information exists. It is in abundance.

If you open your smartphone, you are connected to the whole world in real time.

The real problem is that in that sea of overly abundant information, humans continue to swim forever only in the "comfortable world they know."

I don't want you to misunderstand, algorithms are by no means the bad guys.

They are convenient, so I use them every day.

I watch a lot of YouTube, and I check social media too.

I even use generative AI for work almost every day.

What is important, I think, is to keep in the back of your mind "what might be lost" in exchange for that overwhelming convenience.

The gap in information that can be obtained by searching has certainly become smaller.

However,

there is a gap in who you meet today.

There is a disparity in where you can go tomorrow.

There is a disparity in what kind of scenery you see every day.

There is a disparity in how often you encounter an 'unknown world' that shatters your common sense.

And as those small differences accumulate,

'Maybe I could do that too'

there can be a decisive difference in how often you are able to think that.

That is why, when thinking about regional information disparities or the future, looking only at numbers like connection speeds or smartphone penetration rates may never lead us to the essence.

What is needed is not more information, but 'coincidence'.

It is meeting strangers who have different values from your own.

It is taking a different path than usual and going to a different place.

It is occasionally finding the courage to escape from the world of algorithms that keep you comfortable.

Once in a while, try watching a strange video with few views that YouTube would never recommend to you.

Try picking up a book that isn't stacked on the front tables and isn't recommended by Amazon.

Try walking through town relying only on your intuition instead of searching on Google Maps.

Efficiency will undoubtedly drop a little.

But I don't think you have to optimize every single part of your life.

Life is definitely more interesting when there is a little bit of margin where you don't know what will happen next.

What regional areas need right now is not the same amount of information as Tokyo.

It is to gradually increase the 'entrances to coincidence' where you can encounter worlds you didn't know before.

Not an information disparity, but a disparity of coincidence.

I believe this perspective is very important when thinking about working and living in regional areas.

And, from those small, intentionally created coincidences, even if it is just one person,

"There are ways of living like this in the world"

"There are such interesting jobs out there, too"

"Perhaps, I might be able to do it too"

If the number of people whose eyes light up with these thoughts increases, it is not simply a matter of "the amount of regional information having increased."

It means that one of that person's future options has definitely increased.

I believe that the true value that information holds lies precisely in that.

#FutureOptions #GapOfCoincidence #DiverseWaysOfLiving #MarginsOfLife #TrueValueOfInformation

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