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26 Oct 09

The Way We Live Now - Going Offline in Search of Freedom - NYTimes.com

www.nytimes.com/...25FOB-WWLN-t.html - Preview

technology culture web information information overload

I’m not wishing the Internet away. It has become so integral to my work — to my life — that I honestly can’t recall what I did without it. But it has allowed us to reflexively indulge every passing interest, to expect answers to every fleeting question, to believe that if we search long enough, surf a little further, we can hit the dry land of knowing “everything that happens” and that such knowledge is both possible and desirable. In the end, though, there is just more sea, and as alluring as we can find the perpetual pursuit of little thoughts, the net result may only be to prevent us from forming the big ones.

16 Sep 09

Can Twitter Be Saved? | The Big Money

www.thebigmoney.com/...can-twitter-be-saved - Preview

technology twitter information overload social critique

the volume of material that Twitter unleashes now puts impossible demands on its users' time and attention. The problem, in a nutshell, is information overload. The more Twitter grows and the more feeds Twitterers follow, the harder it gets to mine it for what is truly useful and engaging.
he small number of people clicking on that link seemed to me an early sign that we've reached a point of Twitter saturation, in which the result of more people following more feeds adds up not to more communication but more noise.
7 more annotations...
- network effects
- Twitter's growth has been so rapid that it is clearly bumping up against the limits of its usefulness. It is not only increasingly full of noise, but the sheer volume of stuff coming through the Twitter fire hose renders even what was useful much harder to pick apart and make sense of.
- But it does raise the question of just how much engagement we can expect with Twitter as each user signs up to follow more feeds and each active Twitterer tries to tweet more and more often to break through the static.
- inks that were closely related to the main subject of the feed did substantially better
- orporate tweeting is inherently problematic. Corporations invariably believe that they take up a much bigger part of their customers' mental space than they actually do. As the novelty of Twitter wears off, the little attention that people do devote to most corporate feeds will decline even more; I suspect that in the near future many of them will seem as pointless as the inane White Castle home page of 1996.
- the way to keep followers engaged is to narrow their focus and stay on topic. This is quite different from the strategy that many folks now seem to pursue on Twitter, which is to flood the zone with lots of tweets in the hope that simply sending out more messages is the key to getting noticed.
- A lot of people have already had the experience of seeing Twitter abruptly go from engaging to essential to all-consuming. But it's become a little bit like the map that Lewis Carroll once envisioned: having grown to be as big as the world itself, it ceases to be valuable as a map. The question now is whether Twitter can be tamed before it too has grown too world-encompassing to be useful, and the cacophony of signals turns into pure noise.

Can Twitter Be Saved? | The Big Money

www.thebigmoney.com/...can-twitter-be-saved - Preview

twitter technology social information overload interesting critique

the volume of material that Twitter unleashes now puts impossible demands on its users' time and attention. The problem, in a nutshell, is information overload. The more Twitter grows and the more feeds Twitterers follow, the harder it gets to mine it for what is truly useful and engaging.
The small number of people clicking on that link seemed to me an early sign that we've reached a point of Twitter saturation, in which the result of more people following more feeds adds up not to more communication but more noise.
1 more annotations...
- network effects

26 Aug 09

Op-Ed Columnist - Stung by the Perfect Sting - NYTimes.com

www.nytimes.com/...26dowd.html - Preview

internet technology information overload

“The velocity and volume on the Web are so great that nothing is forgotten and nothing is remembered,” says Leon Wieseltier, the literary editor of The New Republic. “The Internet is like closing time at a blue-collar bar in Boston. Everyone’s drunk and ugly and they’re going to pass out in a few minutes.”
The judge cited a Virginia court decision that the Internet’s “virtually unlimited, inexpensive and almost immediate means of communication” with the masses means “the dangers of its misuse cannot be ignored. The protection of the right to communicate anonymously must be balanced against the need to assure that those persons who choose to abuse the opportunities presented by this medium can be made to answer for such transgressions.”
4 more annotations...
- Cyberbullies, she wrote, cannot hide “behind an illusory shield of purported First Amendment rights.”
- But Cohen says the Internet is different than water-cooler gossip. “It’s there for the whole world to see,” she told me. “What happened to integrity?
- The Internet was supposed to be the prolix paradise where there would be no more gatekeepers and everyone would finally have their say. We would express ourselves freely at any level, high or low, with no inhibitions.
  Yet in this infinite realm of truth-telling, many want to hide. Who are these people prepared to tell you what they think, but not who they are? What is the mentality that lets them get in our face while wearing a mask? Shredding somebody’s character before the entire world and not being held accountable seems like the perfect sting.
- As Hugo Black wrote in 1960, “It is plain that anonymity has sometimes been assumed for the most constructive purposes.”
  But on the Internet, it’s often less about being constructive and more about being cowardly.