Ed Batista

What's Important Isn't Necessarily Urgent

Today Stowe Boyd critiqued a recent post by David Coleman on continuous partial attention, a post I commented on as well.  Stowe feels that David's emphasis on increasing our efficiency as a response to increasing demands on our attention is misguided:

I am not concerned with the 'overwhelm' of information and attention like David and the Sunday supplement pundits he names seem to be. I have adopted continuous partial attention as a meaningful strategy for remaining connected in a much larger social scene that would be suggested by my tiny, tiny office. I switch from task to task, from IM to telephone, from this interrupt to that, and slowly get back to the list of things I am plugging away on. Yes, things slip from today to tomorrow, but an equal number of things slip from tomorrow, or never, into today. And that slippage is not waste, it is not loss of productivity, it is exactly the interaction with others that makes all this worth doing in the first place.

Gandhi said "we have to be the change we want in the world." It you want the world to be filled with hyper-efficient robots, obsessively focused on getting their own tasks done at the expense of others' progress, never veering off to look at a friend's new project, or to answer a colleague's question, then by all means, please be that sort of person. I promise I won't add you to my buddy list. However, if you'd like the world to be a warm, engaging place, where you are surrounded and connected to hundreds of people who believe that your presence matters, and who actively seek your advice and input on issues that are important, then you can switch over to living a connected life. Forget the information overload hyperbole, or the new terror tactic: attention overload.

I agree with Stowe's vision and values, but I think he's misinterpreting David's post.  I came away from it thinking less about hyper-efficiency and more about the fact that 1) certain kinds of creative thought require a certain amount of uninterrupted peace, and 2) it's become much harder to block out space for that kind of thinking, both because we're living within much denser networks and because there's an expectation that you will respond to demands on your attention rapidly, if not immediately.

I agree that being part of a denser network makes my life much richer, and I'm certainly willing to sacrifice some peace in order to be a functional participant in that network--to give my time, energy and attention to others, in the expectation that my own requests will be met in the future. 
And I agree that we have to accept a certain amount--and sometimes a great deal--of "slippage," recognizing that within such a dense network, there will always be too many things to do, too many people to connect with, to ever truly keep up.

But plenty of people don't agree with that perspective.  Their response to an ever denser network and ever more demands on their attention is to respond ever more quickly and to minimize the time spent on each transaction, hoping to prevent "slippage" at all costs--which results in the hyperventilating pace that so many people seem caught up in today.

I think David's response focused on efficiency not simply to increase throughput, but as a coping mechanism.  I suggested in response that whether our solutions are technical or cultural, we have to start "putting a higher value on our attention, and raising the threshold of urgency for anything or anyone that's seeking to claim a share of it."

In hindsight, I regret that choice of words--the emphasis shouldn't be on "urgency," which suggests  a ruthlessly businesslike approach to time management.  The emphasis should simply be on importance--the things that truly matter to us--and there are certainly many things that are not urgent but are important.  Stowe highlights how important it is to respond to people in our network, in order to maintain social ties and to increase the richness of our personal environment.  I want to highlight the importance of quiet, reflective thought in the creative process--taking the time to mull things over and come up with new ideas.

But making time for these activities means other things go undone.  I read David's post not as a paean to efficiency for its own sake, but as an exploration of the possible solutions that will allow us to make time for the people and things that truly matter, while continuing to get other, less important but still urgent things accomplished.

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Hierarchy of Unease, Part 2

Just a few days after Tim Oren was formulating his own Hierarchy of Unease, I sent the following to some of the folks involved with AttentionTrust:

We should clarify just what we mean by "privacy" in this context, because I think the traditional privacy debate is in the process of being turned on its head.

I think "privacy" has generally meant restricting access to personal information in order to 1) prevent identify theft and other information-based crimes, 2) stop spam and other intrusive commercial appeals, and 3) maintain an abstract sense of individual dignity through discretion.

But, taking those issues in reverse order:

• Social norms about discretion, about what is or should be private are in the process of changing dramatically.  People not only want to share personal information about themselves, they want to celebrate it.  Seth [Goldstein] alludes to this in his quote from Goldhaber in yesterday's post: "The new privacy and the old are direct opposite. The new privacy means having no secrets, which you don't normally need to have, because little that was previously shameful or had to be concealed is so now..."
• Similarly, there is an increased tolerance for commercial appeals when there is a perceived exchange in value.  Ads are now expected to be entertaining in and of themselves, or to accompany some free service that makes them tolerable.  A fundamental issue that AttentionTrust is calling attention to is that people are undervaluing their attention, perhaps significantly.  In this context..."privacy" means the ability to set a price on your attention (high or low), and to make informed choices about the attention transactions you enter into.
• I'm not sure what to say about identity theft, which consumes more of my personal attention than is probably healthy, other than to note that famous people, i.e. people who capture a great deal of attention, are rarely victims.  At some point in the future, protecting our "privacy" may not be about locking our information away, but about having so much unique information publicly available that it will be impossible for anyone to impersonate you.  Foolish, perhaps, but a thought.

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Hierarchy of Unease

Tim Oren had a great post recently, resulting from his research into "consumer privacy, data aggregation, and marketing analytics," that's both funny and insighful on the current state of the privacy debate.  On the humorous side, he tweaks everyone who has a stake in this issue:

I haven't seen a domain with more zealots since the early crypto market. There are zealous marketers sure they can make their customers more loyal and profitable if only can pool all the known data about them. There are privacy zealots, who often don't seem to believe in marketing at all - or maybe even markets. And there are zealous computer scientists and security experts, sure the whole matter can be resolved with the right algorithms. And now that the press and politicians are coming to the party, we can expect the discourse to become even more informative.

As for his insights, he proposes a Hierarchy of Unease (a riff on Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs) that suggests different levels of privacy-related violations:

1. Direct Financial Loss, or Threat of Same. Anything from credit card or check theft and fraud, to emptying of bank accounts via EFT, or full-up identity theft...

2. Intrusion. ...This can range from dinner time phone calls, to spam, to (less commonly) junk mail or pop-ups and interstitials. Unfortunately for marketers, the volks-wisdom has these all largely conflated.

3. Compartment Breach. We all segment our lives to some extent: family, career, friends, hobbies, finance, politics, religion, and so on. The configuration, number, and fervor with which these compartments are defended are highly idiosyncratic. But a third party information transfer that crosses one of these boundaries feels like a larger breach of privacy...

4. Loss of Information Asymmetry. Consumers usually encounter information asymmetry on the down side: the loan officer, real estate agent, or contractor who knows far more about the market and has much more deal making experience. But the individual has always had a few hidden cards of his or her own - knowing the real details of one's state of health, financial conditions, motivations for a purchase, and so on. Data transfer or analysis that puts those cards face up when consumers must make a deal feels like an affront.

5. Everything Else. A great deal of 'private' information does not seem to be highly valued or defended - grocery store purchase lists, music tastes, web site visit s- so long as the utilization of that information doesn't fall into one of the categories above. It's routinely traded away for everything from modest discounts to suggestions of interesting books or new artists.

Tim's predictions?

If I'm close to right on this, there are pitfalls ahead for all of the zealots. The privacy hardliners and techno-purists are solving problems that a large part of the market doesn't think they have (item 5). On the other hand, the marketing enthusiasts may take that same acquiescence as a go-ahead for projects that will run straight into issues 2 - 4, and be surprised by the blowback.

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AttentionTrust

As noted in my last few posts, Seth Goldstein, Steve Gillmor and a number of other folks have launched AttentionTrust, a tremendously important work-in-progress whose goal is to "promote the basic rights of attention owners," i.e. all of us.  Yesterday Seth posted what you might call an Attention Manifesto:

Attention is the substance of focus.  It registers your interests by indicating choice for certain things and choice against other things. As Steve reminds, the establishment of value in the attention economy is a dual register of what one pays attention to and what one chooses to ignore (or unsubscribe, turn off or tune out).

The reason attention is becoming more important now is that the Internet has enabled the recording and sharing of these choices in real-time. The massively parallel synthesis of meta data streams has concentrated enormous influence in people and their sites.  Some consumers are proactive in gaining full control over their influence, but the majority are passive users of free services and offers (that actively capture and sell their intentions)...

Our attention data is ours, each of us individually.  In the wake of the behavior of credit card companies, credit unions and data brokers, it is vital that we recognize our right, and our responsibility, to govern ourselves relative to the use of our private information... Our attention establishes intention; and our intention establishes economic value.  Once one recognizes the value of one's attention, it is shocking to see how cheaply most people offer theirs to companies looking for their business.

But it's not just (or even primarily) about realizing economic value or preventing exploitation--it's also about preserving and improving our quality of life.  As noted in my last post, we're all struggling to stretch our finite amount of attention to keep up with the ever-increasing numbers of people and things demanding a share of it.  This is a particularly acute problem online.  The web has dramatically expanded the range of interesting things we could be paying attention to, just as it's dramatically expanded the range of things we're not interested in that have nevertheless found a way to steal a few precious moments of our attention.

To avoid drowning in an ocean of irrelevancy, we must become aware of the value of our attention, and we must spend it wisely, in accord with our own desires, not merely the desires of those entities who have managed to find (or buy) their way onto our screens or into our inboxes.  I think the establishment of AttentionTrust is a significant step in that direction.

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Attention Management

David Coleman posted at Corante yesterday on Too Much Collaboration, describing the toll that interconnectedness (and the attendant interruptions) can take on our productivity, especially when it comes to creative tasks.  Coleman describes the problem as "attention management," and the obvious dilemma is that we have only a finite amount of attention to pay to the ever-increasing demands on out time.  One of his proposed solutions is create the equivalent of more attention via virtual cloning:

That is to augment a person's ability to "attend" to content and events... I believe that you will need to multiply your bandwith and attention by multiplying your self. Some type of virtual agent that not only knows where you are, what you are doing and what  collaboration programs or devices you have, but it also has a subset of your personality and is assigned to deal with specific types of tasks demanding your attention.

Coleman also cites companies like Veritas that have implemented "email-free Fridays."  But whether the solution is an avatar that automates the handling of low-level requests, or policies that revise cultural norms about when and how quickly we can reach each other, all these changes involve putting a higher value on our attention, and raising the threshold of urgency for anything or anyone that's seeking to claim a share of it.

I've been paying closer, uh, attention to this issue as the result of some discussions with the folks working on AttentionTrust (more on that shortly), and I'm convinced that they're on to something tremendously important.

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Outfoxed

Outfoxed is a Firefox extension that allows you to rate websites (thumbs up, thumbs down, or dangerous), share your ratings, and rely upon the ratings of those you know or trust.  Check out my Outfoxed page: it shows that I've accepted Stan (the author of Outfoxed, a grad student in Germany) and the Outfoxed home page as "informers," i.e. people whose site recommendations I'm interested in, and it shows a list of my "reports," i.e. sites that I've issued a rating on (which at this point is simply the list of Firefox bookmarks that I allowed Outfox to import when I installed it.  (It's somewhat similar to Delicious and Stumbleupon, but Stan does a better job than I could of explaining why Outfoxed is better.)

Applications like Outfoxed that run on social metadata, i.e. information about our preferences and habits that we share with others--Audioscrobbler is another example I wrote about recently--are going to have an enormous effect on the way not only on how we use the web, but also on how we connect with other people and how we make ourselves known to them.

Today in some circles it's seen as odd if you're not actively blogging, because that's simply how you engage the community--you present your ideas, comment and expand upon others' ideas, all on a platform that's discoverable, searchable, archivable and linkable.  You make yourself known and you participate in a community through your posts and comments--your data.

What if your social metadata could have a similar impact?  What if it could be used to make yourself known and visible to a larger community?  OTOH, metadata's not as rich as data--voting thumbs up or thumbs down on a site is a shallow substitute for a lengthier blog post explaining that vote.  But OTOH, metadata's much richer than data, because there's so much of it and more is piling up every second you're online--the challenge is finding the appropriate mechanisms to capture, measure and analyze that metadata in order to extract meaning (and value) from it.

Thanks to Steve Gillmor and Seth Goldstein of AttentionTrust for the tip.

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Defining Blogs and Wikis

A few weeks ago a number of us participated in an ongoing discussion that started off with a rejection of the term "blog" but ended up with a nice summary of a blog's characteristics.  Oddly enough, Boris Mann of Bryght was having very similar thoughts just a few months previous:

From Web 1.0 to Web 2.0

Hat tip to Marnie Webb for pointing to this pithy summary by Troy Angringon of what's happening as we move from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0.  I'll condense it further below, but you really should read the whole thing, particularly because he wraps up with a hilarious 17-step approach to websites that begins as follows:

1. why do I need a website? I don't need a website
2. Okay, I need it as a business card at a minimum so I'll   just put up a one-pager
3. Hmmm, make that a brochure site with sections because I   have a lot of stuff to talk about
4. Boy, this is a lot of work to keep this thing running

Human Rights of Users

Jakob Nielsen's latest Alertbox explores the two sides of usability: empiricism (i.e. "conclusions and recommendations grounded in what is empirically observed in the real world) and ideology (i.e. "the belief in a certain specialized type of human rights").  He stresses that both sides play an important role:

As a user advocate, you need both perspectives: usability as empiricism and usability as ideology. Each perspective requires a particular approach.  

When taking the empirical approach, you must be unyielding and always report the truth, no matter how unpopular. If something works easily, say so. If something will cause users to leave, say so. The only way to improve quality is to base decisions on the facts, and others on your team should know these facts.  

In contrast, when viewing usability as an ideology, you must be willing to compromise. Sometimes decisions must be made that will lower the design's usability quality, either because of limited time and budget or because of trade-offs with other desirable qualities.

I agree wholeheartedly, but I'm particularly fascinated by the idea of the Human Rights of Users, which Nielsen enumerates:

• The right of people to be superior to technology. If there's a conflict between technology and people, then technology must change.
• The right of empowerment. Users should understand what's happening and be capable of controlling the outcome.
• The right to simplicity. Users should get their way with computers without excessive hassle.
• The right of people to have their time respected. Awkward user interfaces waste valuable time.

Rocket Science, Part II

Seth Goldstein has finally concluded his epic series of essays on Media Futures.  I summarized Seth's five-part analytical structure (Automata, Algorithm, APIs, Alchemy, Arbitrage) and briefly excerpted his first seven essays a few weeks ago.  The eighth and ninth essays don't lend themselves to pithy reduction, so extended excerpts follow below, and I encourage you to read them both in full: