I was discussing with a college student I’ve been advising whether it was a good or a bad thing that Google makes access to answers so easy. To my surprise, she opined that it’s a bad thing – because people who use Google to answer a question are more likely to forget the answer they find, whereas if they have to think the problem through and discover the answer for themselves they will remember it in the long term.

An interesting insight from a Gen Y. But what struck me as remarkable was the fact that this is not a new argument; I’ve seen it before – in Plato’s dialog Phaedrus (written ca. 370 BC), where Socrates tells an Egyptian legend wherein the god Thoth invents Writing and presents in to the Pharaoh as a gift. This, says Thoth, will make the Egyptians wiser and give them better memories and more wisdom. The king replies:

“… this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves … they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing … they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality”.  [Source]

Looks like my student was of the same view as Socrates! And she may have a point – some of the methods young people use today to compile class assignments can be disturbing, to say the least. On the other hand, in the hand of a smart and conscientious student Google is a powerful tool indeed, and I think that its shortcomings are handsomely offset by its benefits, notably access to unprecedented quantities of knowledge. Besides, with all respect to Socrates, Writing has been around for millennia and nobody seems to complain…

But as the clincher, I must disclose that I did remember reading somewhere about the Thoth story, but I had to Google it to get the details for this post. Score one for Google!

The letter “e” has become a central symbol of the internet age, along with the once obscure “@” glyph. We have it prefixed to all sorts of old words, from Commerce to Bay, from Business to Book… and of course, to Mail, giving us what remains possibly the most  useful online tool yet devised: email.

But things change, and the venerable “e” is beginning to slip. I notice that more and more young people drop the “e” and just say “mail”  without even realizing the ambiguity this introduces – their generation’s experience with paper-in-envelope mail is so scanty that they are quite unconscious of it.

Wonder which e-word will morph next?

I was having coffee with a colleague I go back a long way with, and he told me of his first encounter with email. He had just joined Intel (in Israel) in 1988, and his boss showed him his new cubicle, his desk, and his computer, on which he demonstrated the email application. My friend came from a workplace where there was no such thing, and the following conversation ensued, more or less:

My friend: What is this for?

His boss: well, if you want to write something to someone, you write it in this window, add the person’s name on this line, and hit Send!

Friend: Oh, will I be supposed to communicate with people in the USA in performing my job?

Boss: Well, not necessarily. You can use it to communicate with people right here in our plant.

Friend: But they’re all here in this same office space, why on earth would I be sending them this email when I can talk to them?

Today, when coworkers send each other email from one cubicle to the next, this exchange would be unthinkable, yet my friend’s instinctive response is so sensible. It made me think: now it takes a serious effort to deploy a “No Email Day” program to get people to talk to each other again, but maybe back then the email addiction could have been stopped?

Ah, the innocence of youth…

I was lecturing about Information Overload at an MBA course in Haifa University, and a student shared a lovely story. Long ago, she said, before email replaced paper correspondence, she used to work at a company where memos were written on special forms that came as a three-layer stack with chemical copying. You’d write or type the top layer and two copies were created on the layers below.

This was very convenient (you didn’t need to mess with Carbon Paper) but had one side effect: you could only create up to three copies at once. If you needed more, you’d need to write on a new stack, laboriously copying what you’d written before.

Guess what, she concluded the story: people would make every effort to drop names from the dist list of the memo, until there were only three names on it.

Too bad email doesn’t have a similar incentive for frugal sending…

It has been remarked that younger people tend not to wear watches, because their ubiquitous cellphones and other computing devices make them superfluous (interestingly, this brings back the action of having to fish something out of your pocket to read the time -  a throwback to the Victorian pocket watch, without the chain!). But I’ve just been informed of another victim to portable computing, and it goes back much earlier than the watch.

I was talking to a friend who is also a consultant and he told me that in his workshops the attendees often sit with iPads and other devices that they use to capture notes – and, no doubt, to peek at their emails. He then added an interesting observation: when he asks them to fill some observations on a paper form he hands them, many people ask to borrow a pen.

Turns out that with the growing presence and usage of iPads and handhelds, people use those to take notes, write down phone numbers, or maintain shopping lists – so many of them just stopped carrying pens on their person! The essential geek icon of the eighties, the pocket protector bristling with pens, pencils and markers, is long gone; now even a simple pen is slowly becoming history.

Ubiquitous items of daily life do slide into oblivion at some point (I’ve posted a collection of older ones here), but it is always sad to see another one fall by the roadside of progress…

An Information Overload sighting at a technology conference I enjoyed today:

One speaker, a senior manager in a hi-tech multinational, made use of the TV series “House” to illustrate a point. Then he confessed:

I don’t watch House. My wife does watch it, and I do mail at the same time.

A lovely domestic  tableau, that: husband and wife sitting serenely in the living room, close in space but totally apart in spirit, thanks to the 24×7 demands of email overload.

By contrast, I recall the early years of Television in the sixties, when our entire family would flock once a week to my Grandma’s home (she had the only TV set in the familt back then) to watch  “The Forsyte Saga” on the single B&W channel available then. Television watching – for all its shortcomings – was at least about family togetherness in the days before email!

In the film Her majesty Mrs. Brown, we see a grieving Queen Victoria refusing to return to her duties in the years following the death of her husband, Prince Albert. The film has much else to recommend it, but as an Information Overload practitioner I couldn’t help but enjoy the moment when the Queen – played by Dame Judi Dench – angrily exclaims “my ministers send me letters to read – boxes and boxes of letters!”

This was before email, before Facebook, before our BlackBerry-distracted modern existence; and yet even then Management involved Information Overload – and even then, senior managers took a major share of this problem. Even the mightiest manager of the land, describing the tedium and stress of her royal job, saw the “boxes and boxes” of messages (and, naturally, the tasks they embodied) as a major affliction.

Sure, it’s only a movie… but it managed to capture the moment quite well! 

Welcome to a new decade, promising ever more technological change!

Here is one change that came to my mind: I remember, as anyone of my generation does, how you used to have to wait more than a year to have a phone line delivered by the state-run phone monopoly of the time. In fact, after I got married in the mid-seventies and waited a couple of years, I got a shared line with my absent-minded neighbor, who would forget to hang up after conversing…

This is now a fading memory; these days, we take it for granted that we can get connected with practically no barriers. The competition in the telephony business means that providers are bending over backward to give us access: one of my acquaintances just had a new voice-over-Internet telephone line delivered in less than a day by his Internet provider. And when he decided to cancel it, it took two days of phone calls and endless waiting for “the next available agent” to get rid of this line. It is now easier to get a telephone than it is to remove it!

This actually has serious implications for Information Overload: I wouldn’t go back to the old system, but I must observe that with no barriers and negligible costs, people communicate non-stop whether it’s advisable or not. When telephones were a scarce commodity and their use – especially long distance use – was expensive, people thought before picking one up. When international messaging was based on paper mail, and cost postage, people weighed their words. And when instant messaging involved telegrams that cost by the word, brevity was king. Not any more.

Now, if only we could make email cost by the word, or by the addressee…  

Tolerance to spelling errors changes as history progresses. For instance, in the middle ages nobody worried about spelling at all; I’ve read many a manuscript from six centuries ago (my wife is a historian researching that period) and the spelling of everything, even names of people and locations, is all over the place. As long as you could guess what is being referred to, nobody cared. The more precise attitudes of the 20th century would not tolerate this, so our spelling has become standardized, enabling us to play Scrabble and hold spelling bees.

But the technology we use dictates our attitude to proper spelling. A single misspelled letter in a name on a flight ticket can doom one to being kicked off an airplane; and search, at least before Google, would be useless unless you spelled your terms right. What’s more, spell checkers depend on an intimate understanding of our tendency to misspell; which is why a spell correction algorithm for typed text – as incorporated in a word processor, for instance – is quite different from one used in handwriting recognition; the mistakes in the one follow completely different patterns from the other.

And now I was made aware of a completely new aspect of spelling intolerance. I was emailed driving directions to a meeting, and the sender made sure to point out how you spell the street name (it was a slightly unexpected version of the name). She also explained why it mattered: in case I wanted to type the street address into a GPS. Using a map, or asking for directions, this would not matter at all; but a GPS would require the accurate spelling.

Good thing they didn’t have GPS in the 15h century!

Real time communication over large distances has been around for millennia, if you count smoke signals and bonfire beacons; but it’s really taken off in the 19th century after the arrival of Morse’s Electric Telegraph in 1844. Suddenly it was possible to freely send text across the nation, and the new invention spread as fast as new wires could be strung up. Isn’t progress great?

The transformation this brought to all aspects of life was sweeping, and is described in Tom Standage’s fascinating book “The Victorian Internet“. My favorite part of this book is the quote from a speech made in 1868 by New York businessman E. W. Dodge. As he put it, “there are doubts whether the telegraph has been so good a friend to the merchant as many have supposed”.

Before Morse, businessmen would ship goods a few times a year, then sit back for a few months to await news of their safe arrival (or not; just check out Antonio in The Merchant of Venice). Contrast this with Dodge’s evocative vignette:

“The merchant goes home after a day of hard work and excitement to a late dinner, trying amid the family circle to forget business, when he is interrupted by a telegram from London, directing, perhaps, the purchase in San Francisco of 20,000 barrels of flour, and the poor man must dispatch his dinner as hurriedly as possible in order to send off his message to California.”

Sounds familiar, oh you BlackBerry owners?

The result, Dodge continues, is that the modern businessman is

“kept in continual excitement, without time for quiet and rest… [he] must be continually on the jump”.

Maybe this won’t be entirely foreign to your own lifestyle, either? Though of course we should be so lucky as to have to handle only a handful of telegrams a day; telegraphy cost money, so the traffic was minimal next to today’s digital deluge.

But most sadly, Mr. Dodge points out that

“The poor merchant has no other way in which to work to secure a living for his family. He must use the telegraph”.

And there, at least, we today have a glimmer of hope. Sure, we all have to work to feed our families, and we certainly must use email; but we can adopt strategies, tools and best practices that will allow us to have a family dinner in peace, and to balance our life without sacrificing success at work. It isn’t easy, but if you make up your mind, it is doable. Helping people do it has been a large chunk of my work these past 15 years…