The web is changing - or has partially changed, and irrevocably so. We have gone from the "Web" metaphor of the 90s (when Google could capitalize on the way pages linked to one another to come up with a Page Rank) to the "Stream" metaphor, where companies like Twitter lead from the front, and those like Facebook or Google or Pinterest get it with their Timeline and Google+ products. In the Stream, you're not looking for things of interest alone, you're looking for things you should be looking at right now.
Now, there is a struggle on at the moment to define both the "should" and "right now"
Questions for the "should"
These include, for example: Who decides what you 'should' look at? You yourself? An algorithm that decides which posts to promote in your stream (a la Facebook)? "Curators" of content that you subscribe to (a phenomenon on Google+ in my experience)? Simple serendipity via metadata trends (hashtags on Twitter and Google+)? Or your own 'friends', however you define them, and their 'likes' and rants?
Questions for the "right now"
These become more pertinent in the age of the mobile device, and has privacy implications, because "right now" requires personal context. Depending on where you are (at home, work, the gym, in a foreign country, etc.) you may be interested in different things. The location thing is obviously determining what you see on products like Foursquare. Depending on what you are doing (how fast you're moving, what you last queried your favorite search engine for, who you're with etc.) you might want either directions to a movie theater, or reviews for restaurants, or... but wait a minute - is it OK that your device, the software on it, and the companies behind it have all this data on you?
Probably the only product out there that I know of that deals with this second "right now" paradigm significantly is Google Now, which can arguably be characterized as a stream of ephemeral "cards" shown to you based on a host of preferences and context.
Internet as "uni-media"
The internet as a unified media source, or a uber-media that combines social elements, news, video, television, movies, books, etc. is only just beginning to be viable, although it has been prototyped or prematurely announced all too often. It has some time to go (couple of decades?) before it replaces or largely subsumes these other media, or at least incorporates itself as an essential aide to them (second screen type applications). As we're finding out with books and e-books, or with CDs and downloaded music, often the virtual channel becomes just another way to consume content.
Like it or not, the "stream" is already beginning to manifest - but it has a long way to go before it becomes a proper "world-stream" as the Wired article imagines.
I'm not the most enthusiastic person about the advent of the world-stream though, because it is, well, a stream. Let me explain...
I'm currently in the middle of a personal experiment: I post anything and everything of interest that I encounter on a given day, so long as it is substantial, to Facebook and Google+. I try not to post stuff like "I ate a burger" and instead do more of "this movie caused my existential crisis to worsen" type thing : )
As I do this, I've found that posts to the stream are more ephemeral than I'd thought, and not only for the intended audience; as the author of my own personal stream, I can count on my fingers the number of posts I think are "memorable", that I'll go back to or re-read myself a few days or weeks down the line. This despite the 'substantiality' test that most of my posts have to pass before they get posted!
Problem - The Dea(r)th of Wisdom
I see two major problems with the stream - the first is that given its ephemeral nature, it immediately creates this rush to be "first" to post things, or comment in real time on ongoing or recent events. In a weird way, what we lose in the process of getting the (ok, questionable) social benefit thereof, is context.
The internet as a unified media source, or a uber-media that combines social elements, news, video, television, movies, books, etc. is only just beginning to be viable, although it has been prototyped or prematurely announced all too often. It has some time to go (couple of decades?) before it replaces or largely subsumes these other media, or at least incorporates itself as an essential aide to them (second screen type applications). As we're finding out with books and e-books, or with CDs and downloaded music, often the virtual channel becomes just another way to consume content.
Like it or not, the "stream" is already beginning to manifest - but it has a long way to go before it becomes a proper "world-stream" as the Wired article imagines.
I'm not the most enthusiastic person about the advent of the world-stream though, because it is, well, a stream. Let me explain...
I'm currently in the middle of a personal experiment: I post anything and everything of interest that I encounter on a given day, so long as it is substantial, to Facebook and Google+. I try not to post stuff like "I ate a burger" and instead do more of "this movie caused my existential crisis to worsen" type thing : )
As I do this, I've found that posts to the stream are more ephemeral than I'd thought, and not only for the intended audience; as the author of my own personal stream, I can count on my fingers the number of posts I think are "memorable", that I'll go back to or re-read myself a few days or weeks down the line. This despite the 'substantiality' test that most of my posts have to pass before they get posted!
Problem - The Dea(r)th of Wisdom
I see two major problems with the stream - the first is that given its ephemeral nature, it immediately creates this rush to be "first" to post things, or comment in real time on ongoing or recent events. In a weird way, what we lose in the process of getting the (ok, questionable) social benefit thereof, is context.
Here's the fact: context, depth, informed comment, all come only in hindsight. The intellectual coffee must cool a bit before you sip! And until the technology exists to give us all visions of the future a la the "pre-cogs" Philip K Dick imagined, the first reports of any event will always be knee-jerk, incomplete ones at best and ill-informed/ misleading at worst. Hell, the best reporting on some mid-1990s events is only just coming out!
The risk here is that "wisdom" will get buried in the constant stream of "information", and we are all reduced to reactive creatures who struggle to digest all the information being thrown at us... which is a good segue into...
Problem - Overload
I struggle to digest all the information being thrown at me. Some of it is my own fault - I subscribe to too much information (had about a thousand unread items on Google Reader this morning, which I've whittled down to about 900 now)! The compounding factor in this problem though is the fact that so much of the information is actually 'valuable' to me - there's just too much good stuff around!
Streams can get overwhelming way faster than the Web, even a information giant like Wikipedia, ever could. If you are like me and go on clicking safaris on Wikipedia, when its time to stop you don't feel the anxiety of not being able to pick up where you left off, or missing something awesome - the pages will still be there tomorrow. In the stream though, you have to face the fact that (for example), no - I have to mark about half my Reader items as read whether I should have read them or not! :)
The anxiety you feel at having missed something valuable however is nothing as compared to the next problem...
Problem - Archival
I took part in a trivia quiz yesterday, one of the virtues of which was that the questions did not require only memory, but also guesswork. This was a good thing, because who actually remembers the date the Star Wars trilogy released on Blu Ray? Being shown a picture of a building lit up like a lightsaber however, I could easily guess that the event it was commemorating on 16 September 2011 was in fact, the said release.
I've written before at length about how we are headed towards a world where having our very memory residing in the cloud is a thing, and I lament often how science is increasingly so esoteric, the common man can't hope to grasp it; it requires specialists in fairly narrow-bore fields to move it along. Increasingly, there is more and more we need to remember. This however requires your mind to be uncluttered and essentially be an effective file archive. Not an RDBMS mind, but an in-memory, hyper-contextualized, meta-data-stuffed archive of goodies. Basically, we all need to be Sherlock Holmes (see video below):
The stream can get so overwhelming so fast though, that even Sherlock couldn't properly file everything away, and discard all the crap (no, cute cat photos aren't crap - really!)
The lack of good archival also means the lack of synthesis. In the worst case it means we're loaded full of undigested information and periodically belch out nonsense because we haven't recognized the interconnections between all this information we've devoured - like me being convinced for the longest time that "The Netherlands" were in Scandinavia (yes, I know!). In the worst case scenario, this means you are increasing the opportunities for cognitive dissonance and breakdown, which has huge ramifications for the way democracy functions... but I digress; that is a rant for another time : )
Way forward: STOP!
William F. Buckley, said of his beloved National Review periodical, "It stands athwart history, yelling Stop!". If you'll forgive me the complete contextual dislocation of that quote, I think that is a great way to brave the world-stream. Stand athwart it, and yell: STOP!
Me? I find it is good to be vaguely aware of "breaking news" whether it is the Arab Spring or the Harlem Shake. Staying consciously a month behind on long-form reporting and movies and so on however, means that I get the in-depth magazine pieces "spoiler-free", same as I can jump into a detailed dissection of "Cloud Atlas" posted online by better minds than I immediately after I see the movie (following which I can - and did - buy the book on Kindle).
I find this blog here to be a great way for synthesis as well, because writing as I do (in long-form, mostly) allows me to pull together disparate threads of thought and weave a narrative for myself as an aid to memory. I don't mind if (unlike you, brave reader) no one reaches the bottom of the post. Long-form is how wisdom is before it is boiled down to its pith and sold as a bromide or a haiku : )
A good point that, I think, to pause my own thought-stream and ask: How do you deal with the stream, and the problems thereof? Does/ will my solution (or something like it) work for you too? I await your time-dislocated comments : )
Problem - Overload
I struggle to digest all the information being thrown at me. Some of it is my own fault - I subscribe to too much information (had about a thousand unread items on Google Reader this morning, which I've whittled down to about 900 now)! The compounding factor in this problem though is the fact that so much of the information is actually 'valuable' to me - there's just too much good stuff around!
Streams can get overwhelming way faster than the Web, even a information giant like Wikipedia, ever could. If you are like me and go on clicking safaris on Wikipedia, when its time to stop you don't feel the anxiety of not being able to pick up where you left off, or missing something awesome - the pages will still be there tomorrow. In the stream though, you have to face the fact that (for example), no - I have to mark about half my Reader items as read whether I should have read them or not! :)
The anxiety you feel at having missed something valuable however is nothing as compared to the next problem...
Problem - Archival
I took part in a trivia quiz yesterday, one of the virtues of which was that the questions did not require only memory, but also guesswork. This was a good thing, because who actually remembers the date the Star Wars trilogy released on Blu Ray? Being shown a picture of a building lit up like a lightsaber however, I could easily guess that the event it was commemorating on 16 September 2011 was in fact, the said release.
I've written before at length about how we are headed towards a world where having our very memory residing in the cloud is a thing, and I lament often how science is increasingly so esoteric, the common man can't hope to grasp it; it requires specialists in fairly narrow-bore fields to move it along. Increasingly, there is more and more we need to remember. This however requires your mind to be uncluttered and essentially be an effective file archive. Not an RDBMS mind, but an in-memory, hyper-contextualized, meta-data-stuffed archive of goodies. Basically, we all need to be Sherlock Holmes (see video below):
The stream can get so overwhelming so fast though, that even Sherlock couldn't properly file everything away, and discard all the crap (no, cute cat photos aren't crap - really!)
The lack of good archival also means the lack of synthesis. In the worst case it means we're loaded full of undigested information and periodically belch out nonsense because we haven't recognized the interconnections between all this information we've devoured - like me being convinced for the longest time that "The Netherlands" were in Scandinavia (yes, I know!). In the worst case scenario, this means you are increasing the opportunities for cognitive dissonance and breakdown, which has huge ramifications for the way democracy functions... but I digress; that is a rant for another time : )
Way forward: STOP!
William F. Buckley, said of his beloved National Review periodical, "It stands athwart history, yelling Stop!". If you'll forgive me the complete contextual dislocation of that quote, I think that is a great way to brave the world-stream. Stand athwart it, and yell: STOP!
Me? I find it is good to be vaguely aware of "breaking news" whether it is the Arab Spring or the Harlem Shake. Staying consciously a month behind on long-form reporting and movies and so on however, means that I get the in-depth magazine pieces "spoiler-free", same as I can jump into a detailed dissection of "Cloud Atlas" posted online by better minds than I immediately after I see the movie (following which I can - and did - buy the book on Kindle).
I find this blog here to be a great way for synthesis as well, because writing as I do (in long-form, mostly) allows me to pull together disparate threads of thought and weave a narrative for myself as an aid to memory. I don't mind if (unlike you, brave reader) no one reaches the bottom of the post. Long-form is how wisdom is before it is boiled down to its pith and sold as a bromide or a haiku : )
A good point that, I think, to pause my own thought-stream and ask: How do you deal with the stream, and the problems thereof? Does/ will my solution (or something like it) work for you too? I await your time-dislocated comments : )
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