Coping with world news explosion in ICT age

Before the outbreak of MENA upheaval as well as the catastrophes in Japan, there were the military standoff on the Korean Peninsula and the historic visit of China's President Hu Jintao to the United States. Coping with the fast-changing and unpredictable world in this age of Revolution in Information and Communication Technology' is indeed fairly challenging even for journalists and observers of world affairs. In an environment characterised by information explosion, the main task is to identify the critical issues' and separate them from trivial concerns, obsessions or fixations of some single-issue campaigners. Reading good books frequently' and also keeping in touch with more learned' or knowledgeable' people on the subjects are always helpful. My first journalistic assignment overseas was to Manila in 1996 as I wss tasked to write analyses of the APEC Summit for Sin Chew Daily. Looking back now, I must say that the three great books from which. I learned fairly much in advance in the early 1990s are futurist Alvin Toffler's classics, The Future Shock, The Thrid Wave and Powershift.