Humans and the Network

I haven’t posted for a while…. natural wax and wane of projects I guess. My previous project (http://www.skorebug.com) has tapered off somewhat, and so had my posts here. But now I think it is time to broaden the scope of what I write about and see where that leads.

The thing that has been on my mind somewhat lately is the fit (or otherwise) between humans and the network. This is clearly a big (and possibly unproductive 😉 topic – but I thought it worth trying to focus some of my thoughts “on paper” (“in a database somewhere in the cloud” doesn’t have quite the same ring).

The ‘net brings a huge deluge of information to us every second. It seems that I spend stupid amounts of time ‘filtering’. Between news sites, old fashioned feeds, twitter, email and so on – I spend way too much time each day trying to ‘keep up’ and an inordinate fraction of time seems to be spent weeding through chaff to get to the gems.

There are some great services that attempt to make this ‘better’ (Summify is one of my favourites) – but invariably they end up being ‘yet another data source’ in my daily routine and I am left strangely unsatisfied. 

In contrast, if I am ever away from the computer for more than a few days, the backlog of reading becomes mountainous. I let the mountain persist for a few days or even weeks – until eventually I realise that there is no way I am even going to get through this mountain… and I just press ‘delete’ – the mountain disappears in an instant and bizarrely it is never missed – and I have a fleeting insight into the futility of the the effort.

But inevitably I am drawn back into the cycle… as are thousands of others, reading blogs and twitter feeds and facebook updates – persisting despite sensing that it is somewhat unsatisfying. There is no end of ‘self help’ style advice: turn off your email, schedule fixed times, cull regularly. These are all things that I can do. But what I have been wondering lately is ‘what can the network itself do to help?’