Dealing with IO by Virtual Cloning
July 27th, 2005“I have written a lot about what I call ‘attention management’ and what everyone else calls ‘Continuous Partial Attention (term coined by Linda Stone).’ Stowe has been blogging about this for months, and he and I have had a few discussions on the subject.”
“Basically, he believes that your social networks are your filter for information overload. If A likes it and I like and trust A, then I should like it. I agree with Stowe to a point, in that social networks only deal with part of the problem. I do not believe that you will be able to filter enough through these networks to stop the overwhelm of your bandwidth for both information and attention.”
“I believe that the problem needs to be attached also from the other direction. That is to augment a person’s ability to ‘attend’ to content and events. In my view of the future there are a variety of technology solutions that might help. But I don’t think the scheduling tools that Microsoft and Lotus are building are it. I believe that you will need to multiply your bandwith and attention by multiplying yourself.”
(The bolding took place on my end, not Colemans.)
If you take a look at the whole post, Coleman talks about creating a “virtual self” (he’s not talking about cloning - at least I don’t think he is) to deal with some aspects of what he calls “attention management.” I like the term “attention management” better than “continuous partial attention” and much better than “Information Overload” (IO) because it uses solution rather than syndrome terminology. How are we going to manage the deluge of information? In an upcoming column for Public Libraries (we’re working on getting these columns online) on the myth of IO, I discuss a theory of working backwards (Thanks Steve) when dealing with supposed IO. By this, I mean not looking at the information as the issue but the time one realistically has in order to consume that information. Then, start building an information strategy that works within your time-frame.
So, no need for a clone or “virtual self.” I don’t think my wife wants two of me running around the house anyway, losing double the amount of stuff that always seems to be in my possession last.