- Image via Wikipedia
Yesterday I read an interesting post about the speed at which information travels between two nodes in a network. It was about a so called Data Singularity and the basic premise was that nowadays information flows are so horribly fast that only computers talking to computers can handle the stream at all and that humans are even less than mediaries, but can only really comprehend meta-meta-data.
To recap the changing history of what the concept of “real-time” information means (btw this is a talk I was supposed to have at WebCampLj last month but then lost the artistic inspiration):
- there was once a time when any news that came to the listener in a week was considered real-time information, depending on how far away the event was (snail mail)
- then real-time became the speed of light with human routers (telegraph, early telephone)
- real-time then became instant, but not constant (phone, TV etc.)
But right now we are in a world where there is an instant and constant global conversation going on. Everybody is multicasting, if not downright broadcasting, very many random thoughts that pop into their heads. People are having conversations all over the place and it’s all right there; always.
Hell, even Google has decided to start thinking about something as horrible as real-time RSS feeds by integrating pubsubhubbub into their Reader.
It’s almost as if the whole world is conspiring against the lonely infonaut who just wants to be able to do something while still getting all the information they crave so deeply. I’m not sure where I’ve read it or how far ago, but it was something along the lines of the average person these days being completely and totally addicted to information and that this addiction is made worse than heroin by the simple fact society expects it.
That is to say, if you’re not addicted to information, you’re being quite odd and strange.
- Image by mjasonprickett via Flickr
But where does this attitude lead us?
There are 25 million tweets made every day, that is to say 289 tweets EVERY FUCKING SECOND! Even if you follow a very small subset of those people, that still makes at least 10 tweets every minute!
Count RSS feeds into that … Reader already pushes updates to the interface so very real-time that when I click “mark all as read” there are usually 5 new items waiting for me in the time it takes for the interface to clear. Yes, it’s That Bad(tm). Considering that following only a handful of RSS feeds (about 100) means I personally get on average 500 to 600 new articles every day … yeah, that makes one article every two bloody minutes!
And they want to make that process even faster.
So essentially, as an infonaut, the internet expects me to read twenty tweets and one long-ish article every two minutes of my day. And that’s not even counting E-Mail, Facebook, Forums and a bunch of other things.
Just to give you a sense of how little two minutes is: It takes three minutes to steep a cup of tea.
Now obviously I am quite incapable of processing information constantly, all day, at a rate of at least 240-ish words per minute. For a little sense of what this means, the world record for typing is 150 words per minute sustained over 50 minutes.
Yeah that’s right, those very very crazy typists that type so fast it looks like magic … type much much slower than you are expected to read these days.
Quite apparent to anyone paying attention is that this situation is very unsustainable and people saying that “Oh you can just take an hour every day and skim through the titles of everyting” are downright bollocking crazy! What can be done is a matter of long debate, what will be done remains to be seen.
But something has got to be done ’cause this is insane.
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This entry was written by , posted on March 9, 2010 at 9:00 am, filed under Information overload, Real-Time web and tagged Clients, Facebook, Feed Readers, Google, Pubsubhubbub, RSS, Syndication and Feeds, WWW. Bookmark the permalink.
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Fun post! However, let’s be honest, the fact that it’s realtime isn’t related with the amiunt of information! We had all these RSS feeds for years, and you didn’t complain :p
There is a big difference!
On Twitter, for example, if I don’t read it RIGHT NOW it’s gone. Poof, no more. Just gone or worse, irrelevant.
Or let’s make a RSS to News metaphor. Consider the difference between getting a digest “newspaper” once a day with everything interesting that happened yesterday or having every journalist every time they discover something interesting barging into your office shouting “HEY I FOUND SOMETHING INTERESTING!” And then proceeding to tell you about it.
[...] Thacker of Microsoft Research Wins Turing Award, Talks Future of Mobile Interfaces Real-time really really sucks! Why records DO all sound the [...]
Yup. And that’s only *reading*. We didn’t even get to reflecting and *doing*.
With so much cool & inspirational ideas lingering around, the modern web is a scary place. We need a new philosophy of learning and being in such an environment.
I find this to be one possible meaning of “Synaptic web”, basically practically acknowledging you yourself are a node.
If that makes any sense.
In order to keep any sort of control over our information (now-finally-showing-as-)obviously limited intake, we must let go of personally picking it. We need to fully outsource this to personally-trained machines, “assistant” abstractions.
This however seems very counter-intuitive to most, for the current moment.
Although it’s strange that it seems counter-intuitive isn’t it? Even less than 10 years ago everyone was relying on third parties to convey information (journalists) and didn’t even think of the possibility of always being out on the hunt for it.