WHAT'S NEXT?
Technology Review has an interesting interview with Tim Brown, CEO of the design firm IDEO, on the "interplay between technology and design." You wouldn't think blogs would come up in this context, but they do:
TR: Are there historical parallels to this phenomenon?
BROWN: Sure--it's the whole horseless carriage scenario. Early cars looked like carriages, early TVs looked like radios. Every time somebody brings you something tha's new, it looks like the old thing. It's only the second or third generation before it finally starts to look like the new thing.
TR: Design must involve study of human behavior.
BROWN: Yes, one of the interesting human factors questions about new technology is, how long does it take for social groups to adjust to new technologies? How long, in other words, does the etiquette of new technologies take to evolve? We're seeing, both with e-mail and with mobile, two massively influential and powerful technologies that we've yet to develop the etiquette around--the social graces that eradicate most of the technology's objectionable faux pas.
TR: What's an example of that?
BROWN: Well, think about e-mail. There's something about e-mail that demands a reply, demands a response. But when you're getting thousands of these things, it becomes an impossibility to respond to everything. So we've got to shift the etiquette, and maybe make e-mail more like publishing: that is, you send something out and you might get one percent response. I think that the paradigm of e-mail as letters, as objects, is inappropriate. I'm waiting for a shift to the timeline, rather than the object, as the organizing principle.
If you think about a blog for instance, tha's a timeline. And it's a really good way of organizing huge amounts of information, because we're quite good at sequencing. We're quite good at remembering when things happen. That has meaning for us. But imagine creating an individual document around every one of those individual blog entries and just having them there on your desktop or in a folder. It would be completely meaningless to you. And that's how we treat e-mail now. But imagine keeping e-mail a bit more like a blog. Then suddenly, you've got instant messaging qualities and e-mail qualities happening at the same time.
So I'm guessing that we'll start to see that sort of timeline become more and more important. Because I think it's the way that we as human beings tend to organize massive amounts of data.
(Via Core77.)
He sounds like David Gelernter, who's long pushed the idea of organizing information sequentially, as we experience our lives. But that's not how "we as human beings tend to organize massive amounts of data." When was the last library you saw that shelved its books by publication date? Chronology works only if it's a proxy for something more meaningful.
Besides, my email does organize itself sequentially, and that makes it a mess. The amount of mail is a lot bigger than the number of blog entries, even at InstaPundit. The only way to keep the mail straight is to file it in folders by subject and use various tags to single out important items. And even that doesn't quite work. The problem of information overload is information overload. Nobody's yet found the solution, other than having a really good memory.