Critical information overload
Provocative piece in today's Wall Street Journal by Dennis K. Berman talks about the growing demands on our informational intake, noting the phenomena of "surfer's voice" (the distracted conversational tone of someone who's paying more attention to a computer screen than to the voice at the other end of the phone), "absent presence" (cellphone users paying more attention to the voice at the other end than to their physical surroundings), and other anthropological artifacts of our multitasked world.
People have been lamenting the impact of informational overload and "Data Smog" (in David Shenk's phrase) for a long time, of course. Today what we're suffering from is the layering of too many simultaneous incompatible channels of incoming information: E-mail is only the tip of the iceberg. Instant messaging ups the on-screen ante. Cell phones are now considered a necessity of life.
One response the Journal piece chronicles is the desire to set certain times aside for meditation -- an update of the Sabbath concept. But one interviewee, a daily meditator, sheepishly admits, "I check my e-mail before I meditate."
I think the article was on the right track in pointing out that some of the problem, at least, is not the result of ineluctable and anti-humane attention-deficit-disorder-inducing Evil inherent in our technology but rather simply a side-effect of the technology's immaturity: "All the data we receive are still ghettoized... We could use, instead, programs that will break down those walls, helping people keep their train of thought while they switch back and forth between different projects and devices."
The creation of a Grand Unified Personal Information Flow isn't going to happen overnight, but people are working on it: Mitch Kapor's Chandler project is one key effort. No doubt the folks at Microsoft working on Longhorn feel that this is part of what they're aiming for, too.
The ideology of the PC revolution always talked about empowering the individual, and that remains a good yardstick for success or failure in the arena of personal-information management tools. Are you in control of your e-mail or is it controlling you? Does your cell phone help you get things done or does it keep getting in the way?
This all works on a subtler level, too, since the accelerated communication channels computer networks provide also shape the kinds of things that are easier to get done. The technophobic critique has always been that our digital tools promote instant gratification over long-term effort. That's true, up to a point. But -- given human willpower and ingenuity -- the same tools can be marshalled toward long-term projects, too. Just look at Howard Dean's campaign for an example: All those blogs and e-mail messages and Meetups are aligned toward a goal that is a year away.
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