Informational highways of the future

I've been thinking about how civilizations of the future would organize their data.

What mechanism would a galaxy use to work together and share reliable information accurately and instantly?

I started thinking about our own history and how we manage knowledge in our most complex societies.

As much as sci-fi movies want us to believe data-rich holographic interfaces are where we're heading, it is not the trajectory we've been following.

To persuade someone, motivate a group, or inform a society we have always used narrative. Tribal myths, heroic legends, and the humble parable have always set guide rails for collective thought.

With all the data in the world, coming at us faster than ever before, fiction is what cuts through the noise and helps us make sense of it all. Our anecdotes outline which bits of information are worth paying attention to and they help us make sense of what it all means to us as human beings.

I always thought stories were toys, playful but useless. When it comes to the important business of communicating serious information we must write properly, whatever that means. But refining and sanitizing information down to sterile binary bits renders the knowledge meaningless. In the same way that we're racing to fortify our cornflakes with the iron and calcium we stripped from the kernel, human stories are the whole grains from which our wisdom comes.

It's as if we are not biological machines with ethernet ports plugged into the back of our heads for the most direct, up-to-date understanding of the world. But rather the keyhole of our minds is shaped like a human and the closer information resembles the rich, lived subjective experience of a person the better it fits through our mind's eye and unlocks the meaning for which it was intended.