Simplify, simplify, simplify
The following is an excerpt from my School of Information application essay:
Our society is inundated with information. We crave it. We’re addicted to it, and we know it. Blackberrys are called CrackBerrys, some states have found it necessary to make it illegal to check email while driving, and I was personally disappointed to find out that my preferred RSS feed reader can update no more frequently than twice an hour. Too many of us live in a state of “continuous partial attention,” never fully applying ourselves to a given task because one eye is always on the inbox or browser window. The societal issues this causes — car accidents, reduced productivity, inferior workmanship, loss of true interpersonal connection — dictate that information professionals must play a role in addressing this epidemic of information addiction. Technology alone cannot solve these problems; indeed, while the problems I describe have been exacerbated by technology, they predate electronic information technology, as related by Henry David Thoreau in his 1854 classic Walden: “Hardly a man takes a half hour’s nap after dinner, but when he wakes he holds up his head and asks, ‘What’s the news?’ as if the rest of mankind had stood his sentinels. Some give directions to be waked every half hour, doubtless for no other purpose. After a night’s sleep the news is as indispensable as the breakfast.” Just as technology helps feed this craving for information, so, too, can technology help reduce the craving.
The problem with hyperlinks
I was thinking today about why I never get anything done at the computer. I’ll sit down with the intention of accomplishing X after researching Y. Before I sit down I know it should only take me an hour or so, but three hours later it still isn’t done.
The reason, I realized, is quite simple: hyperlinks. Today I intended to email a particular company about a possible internship. This company sits at the intersection of Web 2.0 social networking and the “green revolution”, and my plan was to research the company, then send them an email.
So what happened? In reading posts on the company blog, I found other interesting developments in both the Web 2.0 world and the alternative energy world. Next thing I know I’m reading about all sorts of new alternative energy companies, which leads me to the topic of venture funding, so I start looking for publicly traded alternative energy companies to invest in, and all of a sudden instead of researching a particular company so I can send them an email, I’m checking my stocks.
As wonderful as the internet is, it is absolutely horrible for someone who is easily sidetracked. Individuals use several different methods to sort and keep track of all their different browser windows and tabs. For example, I try to use a different window for each subject I’m researching, and generally have multiple tabs open within each one of those windows. The problem stems from the fact that one site’s hyperlinks, while relevant in some way to that site, and probably interesting to me in general, may not be relevant to the subject at hand. Add to that the stream-of-consciousness factor, that even if one site does not explicitly link to another (tangential) site it may inspire me to check something else entirely, and it’s no wonder I never get anything done.
Contrast that with research conducted using books. First, there are no hyperlinks, and second, if you think of something else to look up or check, there is a much higher effort barrier: you have to actually get up off your butt, find another book on the shelf, shlep it back to your desk, then look it up. Not exactly the relatively passive act of clicking on a link or typing a term into Google.
So the problem as I see it is that too much information is too readily availible, both through hyperlinks and search engines, and that too little effort is required to obtain this information. This leads to a loss of focus, as one can easily be led from one topic to the next without even noticing the transition.
I propose using a keyword cloud to represent each tab, and one to represent each browser window as a whole. The clouds could be presented visually for the user, but they don’t need to be. I believe that by using threshold levels on the clouds and weighting them based on other factors such as whether a site was arrived at by clicking, directly entering a URL, or searching, and whether a link leads to a page on the same domain or not, it should be possible to detect when a user has drifted sufficiently far from the initial topic that alerting them might be warranted.
Now we’ll have to see if I have the attention span to actually take this concept anywhere….
