Ok, I admit that the NetNewsWire notifications are distracting (I’ll turn them off as soon as I’m done writing this post), but most of them aren’t so bad. There is one, though, that I have found, somewhat counterintuitively, to actually be conducive to staying focused: the new email notification.

The reason is that even without Growl notifications I’m going to be made aware of any new email by the dock icon badge. That is what makes it impossible to ignore. The vast majority of the email I receive is not important, but what if this one is? The curiosity is just too much to handle, and the act of stopping what I’m doing to check that new email is very disruptive. With a notification that tells me the sender, subject, and first little bit of the body, though, without even moving my mouse or stopping what I’m doing I know that I can safely ignore that email.

Who knew that more information could actually help keep you focused?

This first came to my attention about seven years ago when I decided to learn how to use the video switcher in my high school’s TV station. I took home the manual for the summer and started going through it. For weeks I was frustrated, not because I couldn’t get it to do what I wanted it to do — because I could — but because I didn’t know what I was doing. It was: press these two buttons at the same time, then slide the knife down, then push this one button again. I just didn’t didn’t know why. There were fundamental concepts of signal flow in the switcher that I didn’t know at the time, and that lack of knowledge led to an inability to understand what I was doing. It wasn’t until I finally realized what was going on, the “ah ha!” moment, that I could stop thinking so hard and just use the darn thing.

Unfortunately (from my extensive observation of friends and family), most users of computers and other consumer electronics never have that moment. The reason, I believe, is an inability to see beyond the two dimensions of the user interface. Interfaces have structure (as poorly thought out as some may be), and so do what they control. For example, the typical universal remote control has a series of buttons to change which device the rest of the buttons will affect. When I see such a remote, it is clear that it is modal, that pressing one of those buttons is akin to putting down the TV’s remote and picking up the remote for the cable box. To many people, however, it is little more than rote: push the TV button before using the volume buttons; push the Cable button before using the channel buttons.

What is happening here is two-fold: first, the user fails to see the modality of the remote, seeing it as just a flat series of buttons. This is compounded by an obliviousness of the signal path in the TV/cable box system. If a worst-case user were asked to avoid the remote altogether and walk right up to the units, it is possible that they would know to use the channel buttons on the cable box and the volume buttons on the television without fully grasping that the cable box is actually sending the video signal to the TV. It is easy to see that this situation gets very messy very quickly by adding an amplifier into the system. Unless you understand that the audio and video signal originate from the cable box, with the video signal being sent to, say, the Composite 1 input on the TV and the audio is being sent to the Audio 2 input on the amp, it’s all just a confusing mess. Add to that the need to sometimes (who really knows when!) push the AUX button on the remote in order to change the volume, and you have a very dissatisfied user.

The same premise can be applied to computers. It is difficult for many people to see past the flat monitor into the hierarchy and order of a file system or menu- and document-based application. Every once in a while, when I’m first getting acquainted with a particularly large or complex piece of software, I don’t necessarily understand the flow of the program. It can all seem like a bunch of buttons and menus. A bunch of buttons and menus, which, when pushed, change other buttons and menus, can be very intimidating.

Take what is a very simple and elegant process: installing an application on Mac OS X. A disk image file is downloaded to the Downloads folder. By default, the image is automatically mounted, so it shows up on the desktop. Dragging the application from the window that displays the contents of the disk image to the icon that represents the Applications folder makes a copy of that application in that folder. Once it’s there, just unmount (eject) the disk image and put the image file in the trash. (Note that the key here is understanding things like how the icon represents the folder, and a folder can contain other items.) By thinking about this process from the mindset of someone who doesn’t understand the concept of a hierarchical file system, let alone disk images, one can imagine how convoluted and seemingly unnecessary it is. To a great many people, you get what you want on the computer by double-clicking the thing that says what you want. When the disk image automatically mounts and a window containing the application opens, that’s the end of the process. Just double-click the pretty new icon and that new version of Snood is up and running. Oh, what confusion ensues when after rebooting that disk image no longer appears on the desktop!

Wizards are an attempt to guide such users through complex processes with a simple question-and-answer interface tied to a decision tree. They can be decent, but what the computing world may need is something like what the Logitech Harmony 1000 remote has [tried to] bring to the remote control world: a flatter interface with fewer clicks, albeit with fewer options.

These occasional glimpses into how (it appears to me, anyway) most people see and experience their technology can be very enlightening — and frustrating, because this lack of understanding, this “how” as opposed to “why”, is holding back a great many people from using technology to its full potential.

The May 23rd edition of the NPR show On The Media (yes, they capitalize the ‘the’) was about the future of paper. (I actually heard it on the 25th of May on my local station.) It covered a variety of angles to the story, such as e-paper and on-demand publishing, but what I found most interesting was an interview with a fellow (and Shorenstein Fellow) by the name of William Powers. In his paper entitled Hamlet’s Blackberry, he argues (among other things) that what makes paper so enduring as a medium despite decades-long predictions of its impending demise is the way we humans interact with it, and the information it transmits to us.

For example, when reading a long article, paper, essay, or book on a computer, information about how far through the work you must be obtained using the eyes and brain, by looking at a scroll bar or other indicator that tells you that you are on page 21 of 50. A reader of a book, in contrast, knows their progress by simply feeling how think each half of the book is. How often have you said to yourself, “Oh, I’m halfway through!” about an online article? There is a distinct cognitive difference, which makes for a different reading experience.

Another trait of paper is that it offers no distractions. I will admit that even as I write this post, I have not read in its entirety the essay on which I am commenting. This is because computers make it psychologically easier to skim. We want to find the singular piece of information we are looking for, then move on. Sustained reading on a computer screen is not something we have adapted to (Or is it that computers have not adapted to the conditions we find conducive to sustained reading?). I have read much of the essay, but I keep finding myself coming back to continue the post, look something up on Wikipedia, check the weather, etc. Paper, of course, would leave me with no option but to read what is at hand, which is a gift to those of us with disappointingly short attention spans.

Personally, I don’t know where paper is headed. Even as I try to elimitate as much paper as possible from my life (I am among the 15% of people mentioned in Powers’s essay who have opted not to receive paper bank statements), I find that I can get through a newspaper article much more easily if it is printed on paper. I also find that ideas flow more easily when I hand-write a personal letter, although perhaps the slower pace at which words can be written on paper allows for more advance thought, which leads to the perception of more contiuous writitng. Ultimately, I don’t know.

“The maximum size for a text message is 160 characters, which takes 140 bytes because there are only 7 bits per character in the text messaging system, and we assume the average price for a text message is [about 10 cents]. There are 1,048,576 bytes in a megabyte, so that’s 1 million/140 = 7490 text messages to transmit one megabyte. At 10 cents each, that’s [$734] per MB - or about 4.4 times more expensive than the ‘most pessimistic’ estimate for Hubble Space Telescope transmission costs [of $166 per megabyte].”

So basically, consumers have allowed mobile phone companies to charge literally astronomical rates to send a text message: we pay at least 4.4 times as much to send a text message than NASA does to download data from the Hubble Space Telescope (in cost per unit data, anyway). I can’t believe we put up with that. Disgusting, I think.

With the perfect storm of peak oil, climate change, and enriching some unsavory characters (i.e. funding both sides of a war), I would love to be able to take the bus. Here’s why I don’t:

• From my house to the local college
  • Driving: 10 minutes
  • Bus: 55 minutes, including a 35-minute walk
• From my house to my yoga studio
  • Driving: 6 minutes
  • Bus: 42 minutes, only 2 of which are on the bus
• From my house to my dad’s workplace
  • Driving: 17 minutes
  • Bus: 2 hours, 48 minutes

Pretty pathetic.

So remember, kids: email is for correspondence, syndication is for news.

I certainly can’t say that this addiction problem has interfered with my success in other endeavors. After all, I did manage to do quite well in college and get into a master’s program in addition to managing to write a blog post now and then (and even create a whole blog site) without getting too sidetracked by NetNewsWire. (Ironically, I started using NetNewsWire in the hopes that having everything aggregated in one place would prevent me from browsing around so much. I don’t think it’s done that.) And it isn’t like there aren’t other things I’d love to read, like, for example, books. But there’s something so addictive about the computer. It really is horrible.

In yoga there has been talk of quitting the newspaper, and while I can appreciate why someone would want to do that, it seems like something of a contradiction: how can one be a caring citizen if they are not well informed? I have at least started to turn off the radio (generally tuned to NPR) while I drive.

Here’s the new rule: forums no more than once a day for twenty minutes unless it’s work-related. (There, it’s out in public, so now I really have to stick to it.)

I think the big thing I need to get into my head is that it doesn’t matter if someone posts something new. My life is not going to change. Checking Apple’s website once a day is plenty. Ok, I need to go see if any Adium Trac tickets are updated….