Sep 26, 2008
Expanding The Brainwidth
Brainwidth = Our brain’s bandwidth.
Attention.
I read somewhere lately (lost the link) how the internet is making it more difficult for us to process longer texts today. What does that mean?
I have been thinking about some of the questions in my last post, as well as earlier posts on DLTQ. For instance, there was the April 2005 entry “Let’s Hack the Attention Hierarchy!” and my follow-up “Hacking the attention hierarchy” from later that year.
I then thought about Chris Anderson’s talk with Charlie Rose about ‘Free’. And I thought about Gary Vaynerchuk’s talk from a few days ago where he also referred to ‘freemiums’.
This all reflects to my earlier visual experiments with fast-moving text and images. Here is one example of a video I made in 2005: 135 frames
Requires QuickTime
Our brains are – to a more or less successful degree – adapting to our media consumption. Some people are better than others. Some people can have 1000 RSS feeds in front of them within an RSS reader and they can then within an amazingly short time extract nuggets, re-publish extracts, or simply add meta-data to items for further reflection – the tag “toblog” comes to mind. They are navigating the field like experienced ice-hockey players.
I am interested in this behaviour, and how we can share experiences with navigating such huge data-sets. And – well – it’s not just data.
Now, re-watch the last part of this video by Wesch which I have been returning to again and again the last months.
How does the disintegration of data STREAMS into bits and pieces scattered all over the place affect our abilities to gather these pieces again? To gather them into stories and new narratives.
This leads me to the bloggers and particularly the journalists. When there is so much freely available information out there, from a firehose of different sources – how do they keep track? Also: What differences are there in the way the online journalist scourges the interwebs for information today compared to 8 years ago?
This genuinely interests me, and it also has a lot to do with my more practical questions of how to teach people videoblogging in a better manner.
This will be an ongoing topic here on DLTQ. Stay tuned.
“How does the disintegration of data STREAMS into bits and pieces scattered all over the place affect our abilities to gather these pieces again? To gather them into stories and new narratives.”
It becomes easier. And it becomes more difficult to control them from any central point of the system. And that is a good thing.
To keep track is to keep control, stay in control. That’s impossible, and it’s a good thing. No one person (not even a machine) can overlook the entire contents of Wikipedia for instance (it’s not only immense, but for one thing, it is changing all the time), and we want it to be like that.
It’s all about power. The power to live our lives, express ourselves how we want and communicate with who we want. The last thing makes it possible to organize stuff – lots of really cool and disruptive things are going to happen, as the cost of group communication = group action is reduced even further. (re : Clay Shirky’s “Here Comes Everybody”, which I recently wrote about.
On the other hand, I believe journalists will either A) become dumber and die and their businesses go bankrupt or B) wake up to the new reality of global communications technology and the disruptive social changes they will bring – and join the rest of us. We’re living the narrative – we’re making history.