When I was growing up, I had two or three extremely memorable experiences with advertising that influenced me to enter the industry myself. One of which took place in the spring of 2000, during the height of the first internet bubble. This particular advertisement was run in an issue of Wired, and although it was not effective as a branding mechanism (i.e. I cannot recall what brand it was for), its message still haunts me today.

The advertisement showed a man in his late-twenties or early-thirties, peeking out from behind a shower curtain, looking past the camera with apprehension and perhaps a hint of fear. In big, bold, white font on the advertisement asked: “What happened while you were in the shower?”

This question rang true with me then, and still does to this day. These days, the internet, nay, the world, moves at such an unimaginably rapid pace, that it is literally impossible to stay abreast of the the news that is breaking, the events that are happening, the content that is being created. I feel isolated and nervous when I am away from my computer for a few hours too long. I feel a nagging sense of vertigo when I peer over the proverbial edge of the internet and gaze down into the depths, trying to fathom how much I’ve missed in such a short period of time.

But a long time ago, I realized I cannot allow myself to be like that man in the advertisement. Simply put, I cannot live my life that way.

The internet will always develop and expand at a faster rate than any one human can keep up with. This, my friends, is why we need our social networks. It’s why we need our social networking tools. It’s why I am a dedicated member of forums that are populated by savvy people, why I religiously read the blogs of people whose opinions I respect and whose instincts I trust, why I am a willing and active participant on Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, and most recently, Tumblr.

Why? Because if I cannot single-handedly consume all of the information myself, I’ve gotta keep tabs on the people who can help me. Because I need to keep my ear close to the ground of the internet. I want to feel the earthquakes and I want to hear the whispers. And I can no longer (if I ever could in the first place) trust a newspaper or a magazine or any other singular source of information to do that for me. I want my information in surround sound.

Which brings me to another highly influential experience with advertising: An excerpt from the Cisco Human Network commercial, which I cannot watch without tearing up from extreme emotion:

“Welcome. Welcome to a brand new day.
A new way of getting things done
Welcome to a place where maps are rewritten and remote villages are included
A place where body language is business language
Where people subscribe to people not magazines
and the team you follow now follows you
Welcome to a place where books rewrite themselves
Where a home video is experienced everywhere at once
Where a library travels across the world
Where businesses are born
countries are transformed
and we’re more powerful together than we ever could be apart
Welcome to the Human Network.”

Our world is one where information travels faster and farther than one can possibly fathom. Attending brand-name colleges still has value and degrees are great, but can any one university honestly claim to give you an education? Can you, in good faith, really believe that a university can teach you what you need to know?

The answer is no. No matter how connected we are, no matter how vast and powerful our human network is or becomes, a network is still, fundamentally, a system that is compromised of individuals. Though they are individuals acting together, they are still individuals. You are responsible for your own education. You are responsible for defining what education means to you. You are responsible for seeking out the resources, information, and yes, people, to become educated. You are a student, the world is your classroom, and it is nobody’s job but your own to be the teacher.

In this respect, the internet has effectively leveled the playing field for all humans. Yes, there is a movement towards business transparency and co-working cooperation, but only because secrets are, on some levels, quickly becoming extinct.

However, to succeed in business, a company needs an edge; but how does a company maintain an edge when everything is public information? Think about what would happen if your favorite restaurant gave you the recipe of the secret sauce you love so much. Wonderful, right? But would you keep going back after that? Perhaps, occasionally, for the atmosphere or the hype or even the nostalgia. But how long can a restaurant subsist on intangibles? Particularly in the current state of our economy, when it comes between expending hard-earned cash or saving some money and replicating the food at home, which option are you really going to choose? In my eyes, the answer is obvious.

So, when the internet allows all information to become common knowledge (even highly specialized, historically inaccessible expertise), then what remains?

Firstly, it is important to make a distinction between information and knowledge. Access to information leads to knowledge acquisition. However, information, in its simplest form, is just a collection of facts. Knowledge is knowing these facts and understanding them. Even though the internet makes virtually all information accessible to everybody who has access to the internet, knowledge is still inherent to an individual.

In a world with Wikipedia, this is the primary reason publications like The Economist remain important. A collection of facts is just not enough, because we, as humans, need and ultimately desire a framework within which to understand information. No matter how accessible information is, experts will never become extinct. It’s the same reason rote memorization will never usurp intimate familiarity of a subject — we still need experts to speculate and hypothesize about “what it all means.”

Furthermore, the fact we all have access to the same information means that even the information itself is devalued. It is what happens *after* the consumption of information that remains key. For this reason, an individual can still build and maintain value, because their knowledge remains internalized until they choose to make it external. I cannot possibly know what you know unless you tell me.

Along the same vein, someone who has done business in China is arguably more valuable than somebody with a Business degree who speaks Chinese. Value is created not solely through the consumption of information, but in conjunction with the post-process. The way an individual synthesizes information is unique to them. The way they expand and combine new information with existing knowledge cannot be replicated. Individuals will always get something different out of the same set of information.

Thus, in the present day and age, thinking (and grokking) is more important than ever. It’s all about how you synthesize information into knowledge, what you glean from that knowledge, and how you act on that knowledge.