Author’s Note: This article was the first piece published on the public WeChat account on May 15, 2021. It has been 4 years since the account was registered on August 14, 2017, and now on December 3, 2025, when this backup was made, another 4 years have passed. Time flies, inertia remains; looking to the future, we hope for progress. Information is an important resource, and its value is determined jointly by itself and the recipient. What is common sense to some may be crucial information to others.
We are in the information age, which seems to be common sense, but may be something many have not deeply contemplated.
Although everyone is constantly exposed to information, few have established the awareness to consider issues from the perspective of information. In universities, the popular major, the Computer Science Department (Computer Science and Technology), is actually under the School of Information Science and Technology (referred to as the Information School). At first, I did not find anything special about this, but over time, I have come to appreciate the cleverness of this naming.
Without delving into academic definitions, the terminals people use daily—including mobile phones, computers (desktops and laptops), tablets, and even smartwatches—are connected through networks. After solving information storage, processing, and transmission issues at low cost, they have transformed human production and lifestyle.
Before the information age (hereafter referred to as the pre-information age), the cost of information circulation was very high. In ancient times, books were precious items. In modern times, with the invention and popularization of papermaking and printing technologies (especially movable type printing), the cost of information dissemination decreased, gradually leading to the emergence of newspapers and magazines (journals). Newspapers focused more on timeliness, while magazines specialized in specific categories of information. Looking back at history since the French Revolution, the Russian October Revolution, and the Chinese New Culture Movement, it is not difficult to see the important role of mainstream information dissemination channels. In modern times, radio and television appeared, making information content richer and dissemination more convenient. Nevertheless, the cost of information circulation remained relatively high, causing information production to have considerable barriers and showing a feature centered around dissemination channels. The academic journal field today still exemplifies this.
With the advent of the information age, along with technological progress represented by communication technology, new forms of information dissemination like forums, blogs, microblogs, videos, short videos, live streaming, etc., have continuously emerged. The threshold for information dissemination has dropped to unprecedented lows, leading to a decentralization feature in information production. Various self-media are representative of this.
The information explosion brought by the information age provides big data resources for countries and enterprises but poses new challenges for individuals in acquiring and processing information. For individuals, the main contradiction in the pre-information age was often information acquisition, with most information being high quality (usually with a quality baseline); whereas in the information age, accompanied by information explosion, small amounts of high-quality information are drowned out by massive low-quality information (even invalid or false information), causing rising costs in information processing.
I increasingly feel that low-cost, high-quality information is a very scarce resource. By low cost, I mean low time and effort cost, i.e., easy to obtain and read; by high quality, I mean information that can enhance understanding of the objective world (increase knowledge) or broaden the space of the subjective world (expand insight).
Therefore, I created this public WeChat account and began updating it irregularly, hoping to use this platform to share and exchange valuable information with everyone.