The Palais had set up hotspots throughout the building, which virtually guaranteed that the sessions would be a study in multi-tasking and fragmented attention. The presenters plugged their laptops into digital projectors and fired up their PowerPoint presentations, while the conference delegates whipped out their PowerBooks and promptly went online. Almost everyone fiddled with some kind of portable device — laptops, BlackBerrys, Palms, or camera phones. One young woman played with an Etch A Sketch key fob.
Interestingly, many of the most popular sessions dealt with finding technological solutions to the daily problems precipitated by the combination of too much communication and too little time. Similar preoccupations have turned up at other information technology conferences in the past year or two, according to Sierra, who attends many techie gatherings. At one conference she went to last year, the dominant topic of discussion had to do with ways of filtering out unwanted information. “I’ve never seen that before and I’ve been going to these tech conferences for fifteen years.”
But it was during an esoteric debate on “information architecture” that one participant drove right to the heart of the issue that seemed to be on everyone’s mind. “If information is like the sea,” this delegate asked, “what is seamanship?” The question seemed to me to be about as profound an observation as anything I’ve come across in all the discussions about the geography of the digital universe. “We don’t talk about ‘human-wind interactions,’” he continued. “We talk about sailing. We don’t talk about ‘human-saw interactions.’ We talk about woodworking.”
His point was that we don’t have a relationship with a toaster because it is nothing more or less than an object we use to perform a discrete task. But information/communications technology is unlike any other human invention because it performs data processing tasks more adroitly than the human brain. What’s more, the wireless advances of the past decade have created portable devices that purport to augment our minds. Whether or not they do, we have become more and more dependent on these fabricated cortexes. We have complex relationships with such gadgets because, increasingly, we can’t really function without them. I could get along without a car but I can no longer earn a living without my browser.
When these technologies create an unintended consequence — i.e., a Google search that produces millions of hits that may not be ordered according to the user’s needs and is therefore a self-defeating solution to the problem of finding information on the Net — we seek to engineer our way out of the box. At the chi conference, technical people debated technical solutions to the failings of a techno-culture that throws up too much information and too many distractions. While the participants were clearly preoccupied with this Catch-22, they largely believed that technology must deliver the solutions.
This orientation was glaringly obvious during a seminar entitled “Because I Carry My Cell Phone Anyway,” by Pam Ludford, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Minnesota. She developed a prototype of a “place-based reminder system,” dubbed “PlaceMail.” Every day, she began, Americans spend about two-and-a-half hours doing chores at different places — the mall, the dry cleaners, the supermarket. But, she said, “people have imperfect practices for managing these tasks.” We make lists, then misplace or forget to check them. By way of a solution to such common imperfections, she has devised a “location-based reminder system.” In broad strokes, you key your to-do list into a web-interface feature on a cellphone or BlackBerry equipped with a global positioning system chip or other location-sensitive technology. Next, you input the locations of the places where said chores can be accomplished. Then, as you’re driving around, the gps chip will detect if you are close to the supermarket, say, whereupon the phone rings and an electronic message appears, reminding you to pick up eggs and toilet paper.
After the session, Victoria Bellotti, a principal scientist and area manager at the Palo Alto Research Center, told me that such aides may be “the next big thing.” But she also seemed dubious. For most people, a mnemonic scribble — “Mother’s Day” or “Beth blah blah” — is more than enough of a trigger to retrieve the memory necessary for an intended task, especially if it is stored in some kind of chronological context, such as an appointment book. “Your brain,” Bellotti said, “is basically a pattern-matching instrument.” Such memory prostheses may prove to be overkill, she added. But then she quickly noted that she herself has a dreadful memory. “Maybe we could stop worrying about certain things and focus on other things if we had that prosthetic device on us.” On the other hand, it might simply prove to be yet another dispenser of interruptions that further atomize our capacity to concentrate.
PlaceMail, in fact, is evidence of the feedback mechanism in our over-connected culture. In our relentless drive for more data-friendly wireless communications, we have produced a surfeit of communication and information, the combination of which has a tendency to clog up our schedules, splinter our attention spans, and overwhelm our short-term memories. Given the way our brains actually function, it may turn out that what we need is more time and fewer distractions, even if that means less information.
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