Tag Archive for 'history'

The Warm Fuzzy factor in communications

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on August 12, 2010
in Analysis and Opinion
. 0 Comments

These days I make a living helping people avoid spending all night on processing their email overload, so it was with some amusement that I remembered how I used to spend my own nights communicating with people – but enjoying every minute of it!

This was back when I was in my teens and twenties, and I had a ham radio station I’d built myself (of course). I’d stay up late at night (when shortwave reception tends to improve) trying to connect to as many other radio amateurs in distant lands as I could raise in my earphones. It was a fun hobby, and it gave me much pleasure.

Morse KeyThere are some analogies to email: I was communicating across the globe; I made contact with many people I’d never met before; and, let’s face it, much of what we said (or pounded out in Morse code) was not very interesting per se: weather conditions, equipment and antenna configurations mostly – about as fascinating as much incoming email. And yet it was fun – an adjective no one would ascribe to email.

The difference, I guess, lies with the “warm fuzzy” factor. Email at its best can be very efficient, but tends to be dry, businesslike, and soulless. Sure, there are exceptions: some emails among friends and relatives can be heart warming indeed, but these are buried under the flood of utilitarian work email and useless unsolicited messages. The radio contact we had, even when done via dots and dashes, was a very human form of contact; it was synchronous, interactive, and for a few minutes would make two remote people feel friendship. I wish email was like that…

But then, the warm fuzzy factor does exist today – in the social networks world, notably the less business oriented ones like Facebook and MySpace. I encounter many people (above high school age, anyway) that express real concern with Facebook addiction and time drain, but even these would admit they find the experience pleasing: you see your friends, exchange comments and pleasantries, and feel part of a human activity, just like radio amateurs do.

But of course, none of these Facebook users could build a radio rig – or an internet router – from scratch…  :-)

Image courtesy Anthony Catalano, shared on flickr under CC license.

The Dawn of the Blackberry Era

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on August 3, 2010
in Analysis and Opinion
. 1 Comment

Today RIM announced the BlackBerry Torch 9800, which is even more chock-full of amazing technology than the model before it, which was itself ahead of its predecessor, which was…

This has been going on for a long time, but it reminds me that the sequence did have a beginning – yes, there was a first BlackBerry, which had perhaps appeared, fully formed, from the primordial chaos…

I collect items from the History of Computing, and I have a sample of that earliest BlackBerry, the model 950, introduced in 1998, which you see in this photo.

BlackBerry 950 - the original BlackBerry

The interesting thing is that this model precedes the addiction that has earned its successors the nickname “CrackBerry”. It had a unique usage model: it was really an advanced pager, not a telephone, and its primary use was to page people in your organization, not to process email. It did have email, but the tiny screen tended to limit its use to urgent stuff only. The text based paging, however, was quite useful: I remember on the very day that I was given one of these – as an early adopter – I left my sweater in a conference room and rather than backtrack across campus I could text a friend in the room to collect it for me. The use of such real time communication-on-the-go, at a time before cellphones became ubiquitous, became immediately evident to me. The tiny keyboard that gave the device its imaginative name (the keys look like the bumps on a blackberry fruit) and the thumb wheel for scrolling were already present, and remained hallmarks of the RIM devices for years; that thumbwheel was extremely natural and easy to use, and I still regret its passing…

BlackBerry 957Of course, the tiny screen was soon replaced with the full size we expect today: the model 957 in the photo at right is from the year 2000 (Y2K, remember?) and allowed one to process email comfortably, opening the door to the email addiction I help companies fight these days. The pager function would soon disappear and cellular telephony would be added in 2002, giving us the smartphone paradigm we’re so used to these days.

But it all started as a humble pager with a tiny screen…

The curse of being in the know

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on July 28, 2010
in Analysis and Opinion
. 2 Comments

The desire to “Be in the Know” has no doubt been around since our stone age ancestors had developed language. In addition to the actual value of the information, it meant being close to the seat of power, to where the decisions of the tribe or village or city-state were being made or influenced. It was a heady feeling and a powerful practical tool in social interactions; it could even be a survival skill.

Unfortunately, this desire to share in the flow of information has taken a nasty turn when Information Overload came around. It used to be that in order to know what’s going on you had to connect – socialize – gossip – with the right people; a few would suffice, and you’d get the benefits of the social interaction to boot. Today, we have email and the ‘net, where the available information is infinite, and most of the information is useless to you. Nevertheless, people retain that urge to know as much as possible, and they keep scanning the stream of messages and updates to the exclusion of real human interaction and useful work.

Consider this manager I was interviewing about his email load a while back. I inquired about a given message in his Inbox, and the guy told me it arrives, regular as clockwork, every week. When I pressed for details I was told that the man never read it, not once. Why not get off the distribution, then, I asked – and the indignant reply was “You want me to lose important information?!” The manager didn’t even perceive the absurdity of the situation: the desire to be in the loop, to receive all the information flowing in the organization, was strong enough to blind him to the fact that he had no time for it anyway.

It takes a good deal of willpower to avoid this trap and let go of a large portion of the information one can access. Being in the know is useful when the know is of significance; otherwise it can just add to the clutter and waste inherent in information overload. How about you - are you trying to bite more of the “know” than you can swallow?

A blast from the past: weekly status updates

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on July 22, 2010
in Organizational Solutions
. 0 Comments

Periodic status reports are one area where you would do well to look for information overload improvement opportunities. In many organizations the network hums with daily reports, weekly reports, and monthly reports, often with large amounts of redundancy. Just take a critical look around you, or in the mirror…

But something reminded me the other day of an extreme example of such redundancy, going back to 1982. I had just joined Intel and relocated to Silicon Valley for some on-the-job training, and among the many wonders of the American Way I was introduced to a wonderful method of sharing status information within our team. Being new, I did not view it critically then; I was just amazed…

Here’s how this worked: every Friday a half dozen of us would get into a small conference room for a weekly team meeting. Each of us had written a weekly status report (with pen on paper, personal computers not having yet penetrated the corporate world) and photocopied six copies ahead of the meeting. Once in the room, we would hand around copies to our peers, so we each ended with a sheaf of everyone else’s reports. Then we’d take turns talking about the week’s events – basically lecturing what was written in our reports. This part was certainly useful, and since there were no laptops or blackberries to distract us with email, it led to real brainstorming and sharing. And then… then we’d all go back to our cubicles and throw all the paper into the large trash cans they contained.

Sounds silly? Oh yes, but again: take a look around you. To be sure, most of the traffic is electronic today, which may save trees (though don’t all those electrons come from somewhere too?) But the redundancy, and the senseless distribution of information without regard to actual need to consume it, these are still there. Who knows, maybe in a few decades someone will blog about it with retrospective derision too…

Correspondence of yesteryear

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on April 27, 2010
in Analysis and Opinion
. 1 Comment

I once told a friend of mine, a veteran engineer at Intel, that I found that people at Intel devote 20 hours a week to “Doing email”. His thoughtful response was “actually we always had this. We called it Correspondence”. Then he added, “and we devoted 2 hours a week to it”.

Good point… I too remember those days at the start of my career. The correspondence consisted of messages – just like email – and it would come from inside and outside the workplace – just like email – and it would come on sheets of mashed tree pulp inside manila or regular envelopes. Unlike email.

So why did it take only 2 hours a week? Admittedly, many factors have changed since then, but there is one factor that is of key importance: those envelopes had colorful little pieces of paper stuck to them, called stamps. The stamps had their beauty – as a kid, I used to collect them, and I still enjoy them when I get them on my snail mail today. But as to Information Overload, the key factor is that these stamps (or the equivalent postmarks) cost money. The whole mailing process cost you; for each additional recipient you had to copy the letter, stuff it in another envelope, address it, and add one stamp.

Now, if only email would cost money on a per-recipient basis, much of the present overload would disappear (as would most of the spam out there). Making email cost, in whatever manner, is one solution to email overload; some experiments along these lines have been tried, and you may see them in a future post. But overall, alas, we’re still stuck with this curse of plenty: free email, free overload!

I once told a friend of mine, a veteran engineer at Intel, that I found that people at Intel devote 20 hours a week to “Doing email”. His thoughtful response was “actually we always had this. We called it Correspondence”. Then he added, “and we devoted 2 hours a week to it”.

Good point… I too remember those days at the start of my career. The correspondence consisted of messages – just like email – and it would come from inside and outside the workplace – just like email – and it would come on sheets of mashed tree pulp inside manila or regular envelopes. Unlike email.

So why did it take only 2 hours a week? Admittedly, many factors have changed since then, but there is one factor that is of key importance: those envelopes had colorful little pieces of paper stuck to them, called stamps. The stamps had their beauty – as a kid, I used to collect them, and I still enjoy them when I get them on my snail mail today. But as to Information Overload, the key factor is that these stamps (or the equivalent postmarks) cost money. The whole mailing process cost you; for each additional recipient you had to copy the letter, stuff it in another envelope, address it, and add one stamp.

Now, if only email would cost money on a per-recipient basis, much of the present overload would disappear (as would most of the spam out there). Making email cost, in whatever manner, is one solution to email overload; some experiments along these lines have been tried, and you may see them in a future post. But overall, alas, we’re still stuck with this curse of plenty: free email, free overload!

How info-starved were our ancestors?

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on February 14, 2010
in Analysis and Opinion
. 2 Comments

“A weekday issue of the New York Times contains more information than the average person was likely to come across in an entire lifetime in the seventeenth century.” Variants of this statement (give or take a couple of centuries) are commonly seen when reading about Information Overload. Of course I agree that there’s more information available today than back in centuries past, but this particular statement always seemed suspicious to me. Is it true? And what if it is?

First, it probably depends on what we mean by “information”. Is it printed information? In past centuries a sizable fraction of the population was close to illiterate, so many people back then had no use for the printed word, pulling the average down. But they had other information, which was not to be found in books: even the humblest peasant acquired a wealth of information in his lifetime – from how to gauge the best time to plant his field to how to efficiently skin a rabbit, two items that would baffle the vast majority of New Yorkers today (to be fair, the latter also have a good deal of such “tacit knowledge” – how to program a VCR, if anyone still does, for example – that is also absent from the Sunday paper).

But let’s limit ourselves to educated people. Did Newton, or Galileo, or Leibniz, or Descartes, or Shakespeare, or their other cultured contemporaries, access less information in their entire life than fills a single issue of our daily paper?

I haven’t studied the matter rigorously, and I’d love to know if anyone had – but it sounds quite dubious to me even when taken literally in terms of bits and bytes. After all, those old timers invariably did have access to the bible, and I doubt the NYT has more text in it than that venerable book, even if you include the advertising. And when you get right down to it, you also have to consider the value of the information. The phone directory is full of information, after all, yet no one would compare it to Newton’s Principia Mathematica (which was a good deal thinner). And, though more interesting than the white pages, the NYT is no match for the bible either.

Bottom line, unless we measure “information” in the most literal-minded and meaningless way, we should rethink the statement about those poor ancestors: they had plenty of access to intelligent, useful, valuable information that served them well. And they had one major advantage over us: the signal to noise ratio in the information they had was much, much better than what we suffer at present. They actually had to walk (or ride) to get their information in printed form; and it cost them good money. As a result, they only tended to access what they could actually read, chosen by them for its value. By contrast, we have information pushed at us in huge quantities through the Internet, and for free; and most of us lack the self control to filter it properly. That is where the real problem of Information Overload comes from, not the length of the daily paper. One look at my Inbox, and I can’t help but envy Isaac Newton, sitting quietly under his apple tree, thinking, with less information than that in a single edition of the NY Times.

Who stole our reading time?

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on February 3, 2010
in Analysis and Opinion and Impact and Symptoms
. 4 Comments

Novelist Alan Bissett wrote a fascinating post in The Guardian’s books blog, titled Who stole our reading time?

It points out explicitly what we all experience: we read less today than ever before. And I’m not complaining about the young generation; I’m comparing now and then within the same generation, whether mine or Bissett’s (who is about a generation younger than me). The basic observation is that nobody has the time, or the will, or the ability, to finish books the size of War and Peace anymore; or to read the voluminous classics of centuries past at all. Bissett links this to the flood of entertainment options, whether TV, gaming, or the Internet; as he says, “A leisure time that was already precious has been chewed into by text-messaging, Facebook and emails. Almost everyone I speak to claims that they “love books but just can’t find the time to read”. Well, they probably could – they’re just choosing to spend it differently.”

The problem, Bissett opines, is that this has dire consequences for our collective intellect, because it steers our mental development in a limited direction: “Sustained concentration on the printed word, whether in-depth argument or fictional narrative, creates a particular cerebral event which visual-dependent media cannot.”

Read the post to form your own opinion. For my own part, I still consider myself an avid bookworm, but this definition is beginning to lose plausibility – I read so much less than I voraciously used to before. It may or may not have dire consequences, but it is a sad change for me personally. Yet another impact of the new century’s rampant Information Overload.

Email overload: snowflakes or terror birds?

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on December 13, 2009
in Analysis and Opinion and Impact and Symptoms
. 2 Comments

Email Overload had originally (that is, in the mid-1990s when the problem erupted) involved the existence of too much incoming mail. There were just too many messages arriving in the Inbox and needing to be processed. The metaphor I liked to use was of snowfall: the flakes keep coming down, and unless you shovel the accumulated layer away your driveway will be buried. What you had to do was set times to do the shoveling, and learn to do it faster.

But today the snow metaphor is giving way to something much less serene and more sinister, perhaps akin to Hitchcock’s birds. The messages no longer come in passively and lie contented in the Inbox until you’re ready to shovel… they are active and violent, clamoring for your attention, ready to claw at you if you don’t react to them RIGHT NOW! Try and ignore a message for a few hours and the sender will be all over you on your cellphone: haven’t you seen my email?? How dare you not look for it!

This change involves a newer element of Information Overload: the expectation of 24×7 availability and immediate response. I suspect that this is a result of the “Blackberry culture”, which speeded up the pace of doing business, did away with the excuse that “I was away from my computer”, and of course enabled the sender of an email to grab you by a cellular call to complain that you haven’t yet responded to the message they emailed you five minutes ago.

The extent to which this weirdness has infiltrated the email ethic was illustrated vividly when a friend who is an artist tried to apply my teaching of setting a daily time slot for email processing. She set hers after lunch, and was immediately rewarded by angry calls from her correspondents complaining that their morning mail had to wait a few hours. And this is in the art world, not a hospital intensive care unit. Never mind that there is no real need; the expectation of immediacy is pervasive. I was recently treated to a resend of a meeting request for a few weeks in the future, three hours after it came in originally. The admin only wrote in the resend “???” – as if this brief delay was inexplicable and inexcusable.
It seems that the incoming overload is fighting against our efforts to put it in control. Scary!

The way we were: messaging before the email overload era

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on November 13, 2009
in Analysis and Opinion
. 0 Comments

A friend in a US Hi-tech company once commented to me that all this business communication that is manifesting itself as email overload is nothing new: we also had this in the days before email, even if it used paper instead of computer screens. We called it Correspondence, he said. And then he added: We devoted a couple of hours a week to it; the rest of the time, we worked…

The difference, of course, is that then, it took two hours a week, where today – the data shows – it takes ten times as much. That’s the problem. Pre-electronic work mail came in interoffice envelopes and via ordinary snail mail. It had to be written, read and answered, just like email. So why did it take so much less time?

Some obvious reasons:

  • Paper mail isn’t free. It needs to be stamped (if external) and it costs to move it around. Email is practically free, as far as the sender is concerned.
  • Paper mail was harder to generate. You had to write it on paper, then typically have an admin type it on a typewriter, proof it, wait for corrections, and so on.
  • Paper mail was hard to send to large distributions. You could have the typist generate a few carbon copies using carbon paper (CC!), but they became less legible the more you wanted; above 3-4 you had to photocopy them, and each had to be addressed separately in an envelope of its own.
  • There was a general expectation that you would do all this only when it was necessary.

To illustrate, consider the analog of forwarding a joke to 50 coworkers. Today, this takes a couple of clicks. In the 1970’s you would need to photocopy 50 copies of the joke, stuff them in 50 envelopes, write addresses on them all, and carry the pile to the mail room (where a few eyebrows would be raised, you can be sure). You can bet nobody would do that, not even if it were the best joke in the world – for the best reason there is, the selfish aversion to make great efforts with no worthwhile return.

The innocent days of yesteryear…

The risk of doing mail in a meeting

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on October 30, 2009
in Impact and Symptoms
. 0 Comments

Everybody “does mail” in meetings. These days it’s email, and earlier it was snail mail; whether the attendees sit with a glassy stare fixed on their notebook screens or they shuffle piles of paper, the impact on the meeting’s effectiveness is obviously negative. This is hardly new behavior… as a hilarious anecdote from ancient Rome illustrates. This is a true story, documented by Plutarch.

The attendee in question is none less than Julius Caesar himself, who was standing in front of the Roman senate, engaged in a debate with his arch-opponent Cato (the younger). Someone came in and delivered a letter to Caesar in the middle of the meeting, and he couldn’t resist reading it – much like a manager glancing at his BlackBerry screen today. Cato seized the opportunity and declared that this must be a letter from enemies of Rome and insisted it be surrendered and read. Caesar gave him the letter, and we can only imagine the strait-laced Cato’s indignant embarrassment when he read it to discover that it was a love letter from Servilia, Caesar’s mistress and mother to Brutus. It didn’t help that Servilia was Cato’s own sister…

Plutarch describes Cato’s reaction: he threw the note to JC with a curse and moved on. He doesn’t tell us what Caesar did, but I can imagine that – being anything but strait-laced – he must’ve rather enjoyed himself…

If you’re curious, here is the original story: It is said also that when the great conspiracy of Catiline, which came near overthrowing the city, had come to the ears of the senate, Cato and Caesar, who were of different opinions about the matter, were standing side by side, and just then a little note was handed to Caesar from outside, which he read quietly. But Cato cried out that Caesar was outrageously receiving letters of instruction from the enemy. At this, a great tumult arose, and Caesar gave the missive, just as it was, to Cato. Cato found, when he read it, that it was a wanton bit of writing from his sister Servilia, and throwing it to Caesar with the words “Take it, thou sot,” turned again to the business under discussion.