Thursday, January 29, 2009
A single stream of consciousness
I took note earlier today of what others might call "information overload". As I was at my desk in my office, happy as a clam and chugging along productively, I became cognizant of the true depth of my connectedness. I had, running simultaneously and running across two separate but networked computers:
- Thunderbird checking my POP3 e-mail every 2 minutes
- Twhirl, my Twitter client pulling tweets and replies down every 10 minutes
- Spark, a desktop IM client relaying messages sent from my FriendFeed social network in real-time
- Google Reader aggregating and routinely updating items from RSS feeds
- An IRC room shooting threads back and forth
- A web forum in which I was asking for help about a problem I'd run into in disconnected fashion
- SMS on my smartphone going off sporadically
- My mobile IM client on my BlackBerry alerting me when co-workers were communicating with me
It at one point became a particularly intense period of throwing messages at me. But it wasn't so much the volume of information being lobbed my way that made me almost lose it...it was the dissonance and disparity between each of the channels that got to me. The multiple and unsequential streams of consciousness made it hard keeping up, because I'd have to adjust to the pulse of each medium. So staggering between them became very exhausting in only a matter of minutes. Productivity was negatively impacted as a result of this anachronism.
As we crawl closer to a real-time web, with experiences that nearly mirror normal human conversation, I'm pushing for a single method of delivery. I want a unified stream delivering my messages from every platform I use, service I subscribe to and data source I consume, ordered and presented so I can digest them all at the same pace.
That's my goal to getting organized.
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# posted by 
: February 1, 2009 8:34 AM
: February 1, 2009 8:34 AM Links to this post:
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