The Future of Personal Information Management, Part 1. William Jones

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      These and other parallels notwithstanding, there are also important differences between information and food. Our bodies require certain essential vitamins and minerals but these can come from a variety of different foods. Vitamin C can come from a grapefruit or a freshly killed seal. Our bodies are adept at converting food from one form to another—from fat to sugars for energy now or, conversely, from carbohydrates to the fat of adipose tissue for use later on. Information is not a stuff to be so easily converted. Once informed that the stock markets closed lower today, we may make the inference that a stock we own is also trading lower. But such a “conversion” is neither straightforward nor assured. Farther afield, knowledge of the markets does not convert to a forecast for tomorrow’s trading or for the weekend weather.

      On the other hand, we can do with information what we cannot do with food: We can eat our informational cake and still have it. We do this, for example, when we watch re-runs of a favorite show on TV or listen for the n^th time to a favorite piece of music or when we view again, with equal pleasure, the photographs we took during a summer vacation. Moreover, information consumed by us is still available for consumption by others. We can forward our photos.

      Metaphors of information foraging and information farming may do more to challenge our creative abilities than to illuminate the challenges we face in managing our information.

      For example, we “forage” for information in ways that build upon the information we have acquired already. This would seem to be quite unlike the foraging our ancestors did for berries. Facing a long, cold winter, we might always act to maximize the number of berries we gather. Facing a trip to Boston, our informational foraging quickly changes focus as a function of task: decide on dates of travel; book plane tickets; book hotel; make appointments and dinner reservations. Each task demands its own distinct kind of information. With task completion, the associated “informational berries” quickly lose their value. Once hotel reservations have been made, for example, there is little point to a continued gathering of information concerning alternate hotels⁶².

      Likewise, there are oddities with the application of a farming metaphor. We may think of situations where the metaphor is apt. We plant the “seed” of a blog post, for example, to grow a “vine” in the form of responses from others. But, more often, the metaphor seems strained. How do we sow our informational seeds? How is the field watered, fertilized and weeded? Is there a growing season? Are we informationally poor for the months of the growing season only to feast on an autumnal harvest? To be sure, we store information. But is this done to stave off an informational famine? Do we ration our information during the long months of winter?

      Again, we can find answers to these questions. But these answers are more a testament to our creativity than to the aptness or utility of the foraging and farming metaphors. Exercises in the mapping of these metaphors do little to advance our understanding for the challenges of PIM.

      In what sense, then, might we be facing a Neolithic Revolution in personal information? The original Neolithic Revolution brought about two profound changes in the way people lived and in their relationship to the world about them.

      1. People actively worked not just to live in their environment but to change it.

      2. People settled down.

      Efforts to change the environment likely began in the Paleolithic Age with, for example, a seasonal firing of the prairie grasses to promote new growth in edible grasses and a return of game to feed on this growth⁶³. But a transition to farming required a much greater, more local, and more focused concentration of efforts to control the environment. #2 above followed from #1. Ground must be tilled and fenced in to protect against the predations of animals, wild and domesticated. Granaries must be built to store the harvest. Walls must be built to protect against attack from neighboring nomadic tribes. Sedentism is self-reinforcing. It now makes sense to invest greater effort in permanent structures of habitation. Tools no longer need to be portable. Pottery, a heavy, non-portable kind of tool, is developed uniformly and independently across Neolithic cultures isolated from one another in time and space⁶⁴.

      The parallels for personal information are approximate but intriguing. We have long been told that we live in an “information age.” In a developed country like the United States, the onset of this age is sometimes traced back to a time in the 1950s when the number of white collar jobs exceeded the number of farming and blue collar jobs⁶⁵. But we could extend backwards in time to a point where literacy, as promoted by public education, became widespread. We might well go farther back in time to the invention of the printing press and a resulting widespread availability of printed material in the form of newspapers, pamphlets and books.

      Our understanding of our world is shaped not only by direct experience but also, indirectly, through the information we receive from books, billboards, magazines, newspapers, radio, TV and, of course, the Web. As Whittaker, S. (2011) notes we don’t simply consume, we also curate, that is, we keep and manage information for later use. When print media dominated, for example, people saved clippings from newspapers and magazines. Many of us still do.

      Living in an information age has personal relevance if we reflect upon the extent to which our interactions with our world are one step removed from direct experience and mediated, instead, through information items. In deciding to take an umbrella with us to work, we may check the Web for a forecast even before we look outside. In the other direction, many of the actions we take to effect change in our world (e.g., reserving a hotel room or delivering flowers for a friend in the hospital) are accomplished through an exchange of information items such as Web forms and emails.

      Are we entering a new “Neolithic” age of information? What would it mean to “settle down” in a digital space of information? The pioneers among us have already long had settlements on the Web in the form of personal (or “professional”) web sites. The rest of us are catching up. We may have one or several personal and professional web sites. We have Facebook⁶⁶ accounts and LinkedIn⁶⁷ accounts. We may even post our autobiographies to Wikipedia⁶⁸. We can construct buildings or whole islands in Second Life⁶⁹. A complete list of possibilities for the “settlement” of the Web gets longer with each passing moment.

      And this is just the beginning. As we shall explore in the coming chapters, we can readily mold our digitally encoded information environment through a proliferation of tools—some of our own construction, many more crafted by others but available cheaply or for “free.”

      Settling down on the Web in this manner need not mean a concomitant “settling down” in our physical world. To the contrary, many of us may already feel a greater freedom to travel with assurances that we can keep in touch through email, text messaging, tweeting and voice-over-IP (VOIP). A permanent locatable presence on the Web may engender additional freedoms of movement in our physical world. We can post changes of physical and email address. Our web presence may “speak” for us in many routine situations—keeping a boss notified of changes in project status, for example, or keeping family and friends informed of our progress on a trip. We can grant controlled, qualified access to our calendars. We can even, if we choose, “tweet” our movements minute by minute. There is a real possibility that, through our devices and our Web settlements, our information can function as a kind of alter ego—the Enkidu to our Gilgamesh⁷⁰—speaking for us, protecting us when we are otherwise occupied.

1.6 ROADS AND WALLS

      Nomadic cultures still exist. A nomadic way of life thrives, for example, in large regions of Mongolia. Mongolian nomads are pastoralists—they tend their herds of cattle, yaks, sheep and goats. But they do not farm. Traveling through nomadic regions of Mongolia one is struck⁷¹ by an absence of two structures so pervasive in an industrialized world: roads and walls. Travel СКАЧАТЬ