I’ve starting thinking about my list of 10 Trends for 11. So far I’ve got…

Volatility

Rare Earth minerals

Stop-Go economics

Uncertainty

Decoupling (again…maybe)

Early days and will probably change them but they are a start.

Something else from the cutting room floor…

Too much disruption – we are making stupid mistakes

Another issue related to the explosion of information is attention. Interruption science is the study of why people get distracted and how best to interrupt people. The discipline has its roots in the 1800s when psychologists found that telegraph operators made mistakes when they were interrupted. Work done by a Russian researcher called Bluma Zeigarnik in the 1920s then found people who were interrupted towards the end of a specific problem tended to carry on, whereas those who were interrupted earlier on had problems returning to the task at hand. This was interesting but hardly important because at the time very few people had jobs that were high-stress, information rich or time sensitive. This slowly changed and by the early 1990s, the high-speed processing power of computers made multi-tasking and rapid response an everyday feature of modern office life. By the mid-1990s many people were juggling email, mobile phones, faxes and other forms of communication, most of which (they thought) required an instant response. Before there was only a fixed phone line and the post to worry about. But as Nicholas Carr points out, a scattered attention means defused concentration.

Finding why people get interrupted and inventing new ways to better interrupt people may still sound trivial but it’s not. Mary Czerwinski, for example, was hired by Lockheed in the late 1980s to work on ways to interrupt astronauts on the International Space Station. She found text messages were routinely ignored but coloured graphics, especially where the colour had a specific meaning, were not.  What is the relevance of this research to people with their feet planted firmly back on Earth?

The answer is we are now subjected to a torrent of interruptions at work, at home and in between. Life has, in the words of Gloria Mark, a human-computer interaction scientist at the University of California, become “interrupt driven”. For example, in one of her studies she found that, in an office, people are, on average, interrupted every eleven minutes and that each time such interruptions happen it takes twenty-five minutes for people to fully return to their original task. Technologically driven interruptions are causing havoc with our short-term memory to the point where we can’t remember what we’re supposed to be doing.

Interestingly, another finding of both Mark and Czerwinski is that the size of a computer screen greatly influences the working memory of their human operatives.

In one study, one group of participants was given a 125-inch screen while another group received 42-inch screens. Individuals with a 42-inch screen completed tasks 10% faster with some people being as much as 44% more speedy.

Of course, being interrupted is not usually that important but sometimes it can be life threatening. For instance, an Australian study led by Professor Enrico Coiera at the University of New South Wales found that 80% of clinical staff’s time in a hospital was spent on communications, so the opportunity to really screw up is real. Moreover, Coiera found that, on average, clinicians were interrupted at least eleven times each hour and found that they frequently forgot to do things or ended up doing things twice. Clearly a combination of multi-tasking, reduced memory, and constant interruption can be deadly in some instances.

The key point here is human brain can handle frantic activity for short periods of time. Indeed, the brain works extremely well in extremis. If you are facing a potentially life threatening situation, the brain cuts out non-essential information in order to concentrate on those factors that really matter. But the issue is that these short bursts of frantic activity have become normal, They are how a great many people now spend their entire days.

—

Taken from (but not put back in to) Future Minds, due out October 2010.

“Never has humanity combined so much power with so much disorder, so much anxiety with so many playthings, so much knowledge with so much uncertainty” – Paul Valery, ‘Historical Fact’ (1932)

So Facebook has 500m users. Roughly one in twelve people on the planet. Does anyone know the source of this stat? (Facebook I assume).  Just reminds me slightly of the hype around Second Life, when figures like 4m, 6m and 12m were flying around. Seems neither has a business model yet.

Did you know that if you Google ‘Too Much Information’, you get 402,000,000 results? Enough said.

Several researchers, such as Alice Flaherty, a neuroscientist at Harvard University in the US, have suggested that blogging could have a therapeutic value. It is well known that writing about personal experiences, especially negative thoughts, can have a positive biological effect on a person.

For example, writing has been shown to increase memory, aid sleep and help people to recover faster after surgery. We don’t know how this works because the area associated with such communication within the limbic system is located too deep within the brain to study. Nevertheless, I suspect it won’t be long before hospitals are prescribing blogging to patients to help them recover from surgery or to boost the immune system in cancer patients.

I just got upgraded from economy to business on Singapore airlines and it reminds me of an experience a few months ago when I somehow managed to go from business to suites without really asking. In case you are not familiar with the suites concept, this is the class that replaces/upgrades first on some routes. It features a private cabin that can be converted into a double bed and each seat has a TV screen larger than the one I have at home. I believe that the suites on Emirates airlines also have showers. Anyway, I am not telling you this to be a smartypants, it’s what happens in the lounge that I think a few people might find interesting.

Instead of entering the usual hubbub of the business class lounge in Singapore airport you enter via the first class lounge and proceed past security to what can only be described as an inner sanctum. It’s huge and strangely quiet – and this is what I found so interesting. In almost all airline lounges that I’ve ever been in the pace is somewhat manic. There are people talking, people doing email on laptops and people tapping blackberries. There is a lot of ‘stuff’ going on.

In the suites lounge it was different. Nobody spoke. Nobody was on a laptop. Nobody had a Blackberry out. People seemed to be just reading newspapers and thinking. I suppose it could just be that the people that are usually in these lounges (Latin American dictators, Russian oligarchs, David Beckham, Kyle etc) have people to do email for them. Oh, and the service (whisper quiet) was bordering on the telepathic and the whole place smelt of money. Anyway, it was bizarre and rather wonderful (I wish I had taken someone with me to see it kind of way). Andrew and Ellen, I know you are reading this and I’m really sorry, OK?

BTW, if you are wondering about the onboard experience that was pretty extraordinary too. I rather wished that each cabin had a short CV of the person resident inside, but alas no. The attendants seemed to know quite a bit about who everyone except me was (maybe it was my teeth or the stench of debt that put them off?). All I can tell you is that most of the other passengers were alone (what a waste of a double bed at 39,000 feet!) and most had perfectly white teeth and deep suntans.

Me? I just bounced around like a kid that had somehow talked their way into a sweet shop after hours and had been told they could have as many sweets as they could stuff in the pockets of their short, ink-stained, trousers.

Hello lovely readers. Can I pick your brains? When Kevin Kelly says the internet is 5,000 days old does he mean the web? Is there a significant difference?

Nightmare here. I’m in a tower built in 1720 in the middle of an English wood. The mobile doesn’t work and the nearest internet connection is wi-fi in McDonalds 20-mins drive away. I’d ask for a reply on a postcard but there’s no postbox either.

PS – I bought a vodafone ‘dongle’ (mobile internet thingy) but it doesn’t work with my version of Mac OSX. I could download a new version but I can’t get on the internet (web?) without the dongle. Classic.

A few years ago, Microsoft ran a campaign with the slogan ‘Where do you want to go today?’ But it turned out that this was not a question but an instruction. Sensible answers to the question might have included “Back to bed” or “Lunch” but we have started to redefine the concept of human freedom by linking it to notions of speed, convenience and mobility rather than with the old idea of acting with minimal interference from others. We have also started to view ‘things’ like documents, videos and screens as ‘places’ and we now stay awake half the night doing stuff that should have been done during the daytime. While we can do things anytime and anyplace we choose, perhaps the quality of what we are doing, and the quality of our relationships with other people, is suffering.

We have been seduced by another idea too. The explosion of global connectivity over the last decade or so can be liberating but has come at the expense of local and physical interactions. This, in a nutshell, is the Faustian bargain we have struck with digital technology. We are free to work at home. We are free to juggle various electronic devices and personas. We are free to do anything we want in our wired 24/7 world. But in doing so we have started to chip away at our souls. The cold logic of computers has taken the warmth out of human conversation and relationships. We have built machines that allow us to do several things at once but we are becoming clinical, efficient and machine-like ourselves.

I’ve just finished reading a few books about the digital era. The first, by Nick Bilton, was called I Live in the Future & Here’s How it Works.
I didn’t like it. I didn’t think much of the new Clay Shirky book (Cognitive Surplus) either. However, I did really like The Shallows by Nicholas Carr (more of that another time).

Some observations about I Live in the Future…

1. He seems to equate deep reading with article length. I disagree.

2. He says that Digital Natives have solved the information overload problem by using social networks to create boundaries to filter information.I think there’s something in this, but the bigger problem is surely social networks creating mindless junk.

2. He cites research saying that there is little or no difference in the experience of watching a movie on a large TV screen versus a mobile phone screen. In fact the small screens can actually be better due to headphones shutting the outside world out and the fact that you have control by holding the device in your hand. Define “experience”? To me such experience is partly to do with screen size, but much more to do with communal experience. Like many futurists and technologists he seems to be missing the social aspects of technology.

A few thoughts on Cognitive Surplus…

The argument of this books seems to be that instead of wasting our lives watching television we are now getting together online to put our surplus leisure time to good use by linking brains to create meaningful collaborative works. Well people are certainly getting together to co-create things but I’m not quite sure about the value. Wikipedia is cited as an example, and it’s a good one, but he seems to run out of other examples pretty quickly. The subtitle of this book is Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age but I didn’t notice too many examples of real creativity or of generosity for that matter.