Ev Williams: Twitter Will Actually Help Information Overload - Liz Gannes
Williams, on stage at a Girls in Tech event at Kicklabs, compared Twitter to email, where information overload can be incapacitating. “The problem with email is that it’s sender-driven, and sender-driven media doesn’t scale,” he said. On the one hand, the recipient hates email for being spammy because “the sender is motivated to send as much stuff as possible because it’s free.” On the other hand, the sender may be dissatisfied because she’s not reaching the right audience for whom she may not even have email addresses.
Blogging (Williams was previously the founder of Blogger) and Tweeting can be different (and better) than email, he said, because people who have something to say can find their audience. That’s a much better situation for both the publisher of the information and the consumer of it. So recipient-based media can scale better “in a world of infinite information,” he said.
That’s also a contrast to Google, said Williams, which serves more purpose-driven needs versus Twitter’s focus on “an interest-based world.”
“Google is very good at ‘I need to solve a problem, I need to buy something, I need an answer,” he said. “Twitter is more ‘I’m interested in many things, I don’t know what I need to know.’” Where Google is more likely to be gamed by a company like Demand Media, Twitter is a different beast.
However, there’s still the problem of filtering information on Twitter. “What we need to get much better at is scaling that system so you don’t have to pay attention to everything, but you don’t miss the stuff you care about,” Williams said. He said more such products were on the way.
I like the recipient- v sender-driven distinction, but I think the reason that stream apps seem to help us cope with a crazy busy world (‘overload’) is that they tap into the flow state in our heads allowing us to multithread, while inboxes are purely linear.
Technotranscendentalism
Kevin Kelly as interviewed by Andrew Lawler for The Orion, recently:
KELLY: My larger agenda is to bridge the technological and the holy.
These are not two words that most people normally associate with each
other. It is going to be a long conversation to bring
them together.LAWLER: Is this what you mean when you describe yourself as a “techno transcendentalist”?
KELLY: Right.
LAWLER: But can you really imagine Thoreau multitasking on a BlackBerry? How do you relate transcendentalism to technology?
KELLY: I don’t mean transcendentalist in a monkish or hermitlike
way. I mean transcending in the sense of connecting to a state of
awareness, of living, of being, that transcends our day-to-day life.
It’s not a withdrawal, it’s an emergence. And tools can be used.LAWLER: Or misused.
KELLY: There’s been a lot of chatter about information overload recently. It is true there’s something different about this [modern] environment in our day-to-day and minute-to-minute awareness. What it means and what we should do about it is really not so clear.
I acknowledge the fact that multitasking and BlackBerrys and iPods and Twitter can be distracting. But we don’t really have the option of ignoring it. The proliferation of devices is necessary to learn new things. And the cost of learning new things is an avalanche of fragmented information. We just have to learn how to live with it.
LAWLER: But don’t we get to choose?
KELLY: It’s not that we don’t have the option to remove ourselves. This phase of cultural evolution, in which we are growing and discovering, requires this tide of twenty-four-hour information. I think it’s necessary and good that there will always be an opt-out option. We want to encourage that diversity, but it will always be a niche. Barring some disaster, society is not going to become a world where everybody stays at home writing poems and reading one long book after another without interruption.
LAWLER: Where is the transcendentalism in this view?
KELLY: The roots of technology go deeper than just human culture. They weave and string all the way back to the Big Bang. Technology is an example—like life and intelligence—of an extropic system, a system that feeds off entropy to build order. And not just order, but self-amplifying order of exploding complexity and depth. Extropic systems create even more entropy in the process—that is, energy runs through the system at a faster and denser pace. This is the definition of self-sustaining systems like a living organism. There’s continuity from the beginning of the universe, which is expanding out and creating space to allow diversity to flourish.
What we have is a long-term trend of increasing diversity, complexity, and specialization—all characteristics of self-sustaining systems. That could be a galaxy or a sun or intelligence. The resulting density of power is technology. I use the term “the Technium.” A galaxy is a system composed of individual technologies, complex enough to have its own self-sustaining qualities including self-preservation. It is self-perpetuating and self-increasing. You could say that humans are the sexual organs of technology—that we are necessary for its survival. But it has its own inertia, urgency, tendencies, and bias.
LAWLER: Other than to reproduce, what is the purpose of these systems?
KELLY: These systems are evolving evolution. They are increasing degrees of freedom. And this is the theological part—we have the infinite game. The game is to extend the game, so that the game will keep going. The game is to keep changing the nature of change. And that infinite game is my view of holiness. You play the game not to win, but to continue to play to make room for all expressions of truth, good, and the beautiful. You are opening up the world to possibility. Every child born on Earth today has some particular mixture of genes and environment, of capability and intelligence to unleash. The game is about trying to educate that individual into a position where they can maximize their potential and possibility. And technology is the instrument.
Kelly’s Technotranscentalism is somewhere to the west of the neo Taoism (or Tao Lite) that I espouse. Tao Lite which is more of a nature religion, based on how the world works. His TT is more focused on the growing noosphere: the game of evolution. He is more of a progressivist, stressing the evolution and wave front of change. New Taoism focuses on the changeless, steady state of natural laws.
But these are two sides of the same coin.
Overload, Shmoverload: The Myth Of Personal Productivity
The newest attack on connectedness and whole brain attention is here, spouting conventional wisdom as gospel:
[from Lost in E-Mail, Tech Firms Face Self-Made Beast by Matt Richtel]The onslaught of cellphone calls and e-mail and instant messages is fracturing attention spans and hurting productivity. It is a common complaint. But now the very companies that helped create the flood are trying to mop it up.
[…]
Their effort comes as statistical and anecdotal evidence mounts that the same technology tools that have led to improvements in productivity can be counterproductive if overused.
The big chip maker Intel found in an eight-month internal study that some employees who were encouraged to limit digital interruptions said they were more productive and creative as a result.
[…]
Many people readily recognize that they face — or invite — continual interruption, but the emerging data on the scale of the problem may come as a surprise.
A typical information worker who sits at a computer all day turns to his e-mail program more than 50 times and uses instant messaging 77 times, according to one measure by RescueTime, a company that analyzes computer habits. The company, which draws its data from 40,000 people who have tracking software on their computers, found that on average the worker also stops at 40 Web sites over the course of the day.
The fractured attention comes at a cost. In the United States, more than $650 billion a year in productivity is lost because of unnecessary interruptions, predominately mundane matters, according to Basex. The firm says that a big chunk of that cost comes from the time it takes people to recover from an interruption and get back to work.
Ok. Let’s take it from the top. I will just mention in passing that a company called Rescuetime is unlikely to structure any study at any time that ever suggests that anything other than personal productivity should be important to management. Basex seems to be following the same miserly chain of thought, as well.
My rebuttal:
Personal productivity — While people may think the appropriate unit of measuring the benefits of social tools is personal productivity, it isn’t.
As we have moved from hierarchical, top-down, centralized work — think Henry Ford’s assembly lines or the pre-Internet global corporation — to networked, bottom-up, edgewise work personal productivity has been trumped by network productivity. Network productivity is the effectiveness of a person’s entire network: contacts, contacts of contacts, and so on.
Connected people will naturally gravitate toward an ethic where they will trade personal productivity for connectedness: they will interrupt their own work to help a contact make progress. Ultimately, in a bottom-up fashion, this leads to the network as a whole making more progress than if each individual tries to optimize personal productivity. (Trust me, its provable. I studied queuing theory in graduate school.) I call this Boyd’s Law, by the way.
Perhaps more importantly, the willingness to assist others leads to closer social connections, and increases the likelihood of reciprocal behavior, where an obsession with personal productivity does not.
“Some” found they were more productive and creative by minimizing interruptions — I am in favor of people having time away from others, to do all sorts of things. Sleeping, writing, playing the guitar, sex — there are an unending set of things that people should do while disconnected.
However, while I advocate disconnecting for these reasons, I am remain convinced that the bias should be toward remaining connected to the greatest degree that allows individuals the time apart and disconnected that they need to make sense of the world through creative and contemplative pursuits, and no more.
My argument is not really about the downside of missing something flowing by the torrent of information everyday, nor is it about being a busy little bee working like mad on some sort of modern information assembly line. It is about the psychological, spiritual, and work benefits of connection. Note that for these to hold, people will have to learn to be much more judicious in the determination of who — and how many — they will connect with. The willingness to swap personal productivity for connection is just that: it is an ethical choice that asserts that the bonds of connection, today and over time, are more important — not just abstractly, but in the most concrete way — than making headway on this piece of work, right now.
On a work basis, businesses today want it (or think they want it) both ways. They want their employees to be personally productive, making the classic logical error that if everyone is highly productive personally then the company will be. Nope.
But at the same time, the company is still arrogating to itself control of connections. Most obviously, a worker can’t really choose who to work with, which projects are most interesting, which bosses are worth listening to, and so on. Like pigeons pecking a button in a Skinner box, the enterprise gives its workers an on/off switch but little other control.
Can workers opt to ‘block’ messages from dumb managers? Can they direct email that they are cc’d on to the spam filter? No. But they should.
Participation costs — Yes, it is true that moving from one full brain task to a different full brain task has a high cost of participation, especially for some one who doesn’t transition from task to task on a regular basis. However, learning to operate in a flow mindstate, where partial attention is being paid to “partial tasks”, can lead to the transitions costing less at each interruption.
Consider the case where I am doing something involving frequent mental churn, like reading and responding to email. If I get involved in a series of parallel instant messaging sessions at the same time, the apparent costs of switching from one to the other fall, just like being involved in a discussion with a bunch of people at a cocktail party.
Or like the highway on the way to work: you have to deal with many cars as you commute. That’s the way it is. While it is true that your commute would be quicker with no other cars on the road: well, sorry, that’s not the way the world works. Of course, you might argue that to the degree that it is in your control, you should minimize the number of cars you expose yourself to. But the counter argument is that we need to expose ourselves to the challenges that we need to face, in order to gain the skills necessary to survive, or excel. Just like we are now learning that we need to expose our kids to a reasonable amount of dirt, so they get exposed to enough bacteria that they don’t grow up like autoimmune-challenged lab rats, suffering from every allergy under the sun.
The old school thinking is about individual productivity: but the social revolution has moved past that into network productivity, which entails connectedness and social meaning. The personal hit on productivity is real, but it’s not a cost: it’s an investment; and the juice is worth the squeeze.
And in the case of the conversational swarm at the cocktail party: you may think it would be more productive to have just one-on-one conversations — to focus mindfully on one friend at a time — but the reality is more complex. There can be a significantly greater spark when a diverse collection of people are involved in a swapping of views on some subject, or even a collection of related subjects. You can learn more, experience more, gain more, although there is a greater level of mental gymnastics involved.
This doesn’t detract from the benefits of one-on-one conversation, but does suggest that we need exposure to larger group interactions to learn how to participate in and benefit from them. Just like we need to drive on busy streets to learn to drive safely, and finally, to learn to drive safely while listening to the radio and carrying on a conversation with someone in the passenger’s seat.
As we become habituated to media — like the radio in the car — we can remain aware of it with out dedicating our full attention to it. This has taken time to trickle through to popular culture. The same change is at work in business.
I have said for years that the centroids — media, religion, government, and corporations — would war against connectedness and the flow consciousness that is needed to operate in the new social Web. It is inherently subversive, because at its core flow is about remaining connected to those that matter to you over the more formal and official relationships that individuals are supposed to have with organizations.
The small shift of consciousness that comes from remaining in the flow setting — messages and posts flitting by, dozens of chats, firing off quick updates to your circles of contacts — seems like the devil to the advocates of industrial age thinking and practices. Stop fooling around, get back to work, stop daydreaming, quit gossiping, get those coversheets on the TPS reports!
But the real issue is what is of value, and how to measure it.
The old school thinking is about individual productivity: but the social revolution has moved past that into network productivity, which entails connectedness and social meaning. The personal hit on productivity is real, but it’s not a cost: it’s an investment; and the juice is worth the squeeze.
They may say that we are getting lost in the flurry of tools we are using, but the truth is we are just moving out of their field of vision. Just like a novice watching a martial arts master, they can’t see what it is we are doing. They will have to come to the dojo for a few years, and then — maybe — they will be able to see.
Overload, Shmoverload
I gave a talk at the recent Etel conference, and I have subsequently decided to post the preso under a new name. The O’Reilly organizers had offered up “Communications Overload” way back when, and a few weeks ago — before putting my thoughts and slides together — I had asked them to change the name to “Communications Underload: A Contrarian Approach” which they did.
After the thoughts I struggled with in the few past days, and the experience of actually presenting the talk (it was not so much a workshop as a ridiculously long talk), I am going to rename the materials as “Overload, Shmoverload”.
I wish I has an audio of the preso. I think I will do that in the future. Here’s a SlideShare of the preso:
Overload, Shmoverload View more presentations from Stowe Boyd.
What did I talk about? A few points:
- We don’t really know what attention is, despite all the mumbo-jumbo spouted by Nobel laureates (Herbert Simon - “What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.”), best-selling business book authors (Tom Davenport and John Beck - “The scarcest resource for today’s business leaders is no longer just land, capital, or human labor, and it certainly isn’t information. Attention is what’s in short supply.”), or high tech self-help gurus (Linda Stone - continuous partial attention). It may involve several related cognitive centers, but at any rate, modern psychology/cognitive science hasn’t figured it out.
- My guess: most of what people say about attention is hogwash: mere anecdotes, or flimsy cultural norms offered up in a ‘be productive, be happy’ wrapper.
- Whenever business thinkers seek to apply an economic metaphor to human cognition, it is a mess: remember “knowledge management”?
- Attention — whatever it really is — is not an economic factor, like the price of gas. It is not a resource: it is not fungible. It can’t be bought, sold, or created.
- Are we being driven crazy by Toffler’s Information Overload? Is the ADD epidemic a result of information cracking our kids?
- We are transitioning to a new ethos, in which remaining connected to those most important to us is more imporant (and more valuable, in the final analysis) than personal productivity. This seems counterintuitive, since people talk about time stress the way that people in the agricultural era talked about backache. But the productivity of the network — those that matter to you — is more important than the piecework in your lap.
- We have to spand more time scanning the horizon — keeping up with all your friends’ status updates on Twitter, reviewing the newest posts on techmeme, etc. — than people used to, because the rate of change has increased. The hypothetical value of focusing on one thing and getting it done as quickly as possible has decreased.
- We are switching to a time in which the dominant mode will be flow, not focus.
- How do jugglers juggle? They don’t focus on the balls, the movements, or timing. They unfocus: it is a field of all three dimensions and their attention is distributed. Good jugglers can also sing or tell jokes while juggling. Unfocus.
- In an era of flow you can ignore things that don’t look threatening or critical. Important stuff will be signalled in a bunch of ways: critical breaking news stories will show in Twitter tweets, RSS, emails, IM. But you can just ignore transient stuff. That’s why etiquette around IM has to be based on ‘it’s ok to ignore IMs’ because otherwise it becomes a chore demanding foreground attention.
- Don’t listen to industrial era or information era (the last stage of industrial-ism) nonsense about personal productivity. Don’t listen to the Man.
- The network is mostly connections. The connections matter, give it value, not the nodes.
- Flow Strategies: (yes, I offered some cheap advice)
- Time is a shared space — your time is truly not your own
- Productivity is second to Connection: network productivity trumps personal productivity
- Everything important will find its way to you many, many times: don’t worry if you miss it
- Remain in the flow: be wrapped up in the thing that has captured your attention
- The way we think of time colors everything:
- Physics time: part of the fabric of the universe — this is how physicists make sense of things, but not relevant for us, really.
- Linear (Industrial) time: Kant/Leibnitz shaped the western notion of time as something we are passing through — this is a recent invention, and underlies undustrial era notions of progress.
- Cyclical (Mystical) time: time as the unending moment — limited to transcendent moments for most of us who are not yet enlightened.
- Flow (Lived) time: we are in the unending moment through which everything flows — Piaget and others have noted that time dliates: sometimes it goes slow, sometimes it zooms. When you are in the zone, the tennis (base, soccer, basket) ball seems to slow down and there is plenty of time to get into the right position, without consciously thinking of it.
- The New Balancing Act: “For the average person, linked in a dense, cascading social network of collaborators who depend on your timely response to critical events, it will prove increasingly difficult — if not impossible — to veer away from continuous partial attention. We will have to learn a new balancing act, and it will be strongly canted toward spending more cycles scanning the horizon and fewer looking down at the piecework in our laps”
Looks like a book struggling to be written. Down, boy.
Social anthropologist, clairvoyant, postfuturist.
