dria.org

Andrew Keen wrote a book called The Cult of the Amateur: How today’s Internet is killing our culture. David Weinberger wrote a book called Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder. Both of these books are more or less about the Web, only Keen thinks it’s terrible and Weinberger thinks it’s wonderful.

The Wall Street Journal set them to debating, and the full result is here: Full Text: Keen vs. Weinberger. It is a long but fascinating read.

“…much has been written about the demise of e-mail, given the annoyance of spam and the rise of tools like instant messaging, voice over IP and text messaging. But e-mail has hung on to its utility in office environments and at home, even if it’s given up some ground to new challengers. It may be that social networks are the most potent new rival to e-mail, one of the Internet’s oldest forms of communication. With tens of millions of members on their respective networks, MySpace and Facebook can wield great influence over a generation living online, either through the cell phone or the Internet.”

Link.

I love the Internet. It is a fundamental part of my daily life — my work, my hobbies, my interests, my news, my entertainment, and my communication streams all involve computers, the Internet, and/or the Web in some way. Recently there has been an explosion in the number of applications I use to get information and to communicate with people online: email (Google, Zimbra), IRC, IM (jabber, AIM, ichat), Twitter, web feeds (back up to over 350 now), a host of forums, an even larger host of websites (both social and non), and so forth.

Unfortunately, the result is that my attention is utterly fractured. If it’s not a conversation in one of my dozen IRC channels it’s an IM message; if not an IM message then it’s a Twitter update, or an email, or my feed reader has new items, or I’m flipping through my dozens of browser tabs, or my calendar is reminding me of one or another meetings or other appointments. I am becoming overwhelmed by this firehose of information, and it’s destroying my ability to focus, to read and think deeply, and, fundamentally, to get work done.

It needs to stop. At very least, it needs to be reduced to a trickle. Thus, I am going on an information diet. The changes I will be working towards are outlined below. “Working towards” means that while I doubt I will stick strictly to this regimen, it is the disciplined ideal towards which I strive.

1) During the work day I will only be checking personal email twice — once at the beginning of the day, and once at lunch (”lunch” can range from 11am to 2pm Eastern Time). After hours, I’ll check when I happen to think of it.

2) During the non-work day I will only be checking work mail once — sometime between dinner and bed. No guarantees what time that will be or whether I’ll be doing anything more than flagging items of interest to deal with the next work day.

3) Over the weekend I will be checking both personal and work mail only twice per day — once in the morning and once before bed.

4) Scheduled meetings are sacred. If I’m scheduled and expected to attend a meeting, I will. If it’s an optional meeting, I will make the decision whether or not to attend when my iCal reminder pops up. If there’s an optional meeting you think I should definitely attend, let me know. I don’t mind meetings, I just want to keep them to a useful minimum.

5) Twitter, while entertaining, has not yet proven to be useful. It will be getting shut off during work hours from here on out. Bummer because it’s invariably good for a laugh, but it’s just too distracting.

6) I will be reducing my IRC channels to the bare minimum during work days. Outside of work hours, all bets are off. If you need to contact me try instant message first, calling my work extension second, or calling my cell third. If I respond to none of these, please email me at my work address if it’s work-related or my personal address if it’s not-work-related.

7) I’ve organized my web feeds into two major groups: “Work” and “Everything Else”. I am reducing the update frequency from every 15 mins to every 2 hours. I will only be checking the “Everything Else” group outside of work hours. Oh lolcats, I will miss you so.

8) When I’m in a phone meeting I will be minimizing all windows except those directly involved with the meeting (agenda, notes, backchannel). Harsh, but necessary. I sat through two phone meetings today and realized that I didn’t hear a single word because I was too busy yammering away in unrelated IRC channels and scanning my web feeds. This is both rude and a complete waste of time, and I apologize for it.

9) I will be unplugging for at least one work hour per day. This means I will simply go offline. During that time I will either be reading, thinking, or working on proposals/documentation/etc. If it turns out that I’m getting solid work done, I reserve the right to extend my unplugged time indefinitely. Turns out a lot of my job is thinking, reading, and writing. If I appear to be offline and you need to contact me, call my extension or my cell.

10) Kinhin. Ok, not technically kinhin, but a very distant personal approximation thereof. Kinhin is a walking form of Zen meditation. Real Zen practitioners do kinhin between periods of zazen (sitting meditation), and it is a very rigorous, formal practice. For me it just means “walking for an hour every day and trying to get my mojo back”.

From an article with an interesting, if arguable, perspective:

“User Experience” has not changed much in two decades. Due to bloated code that has to incorporate hundreds of functions that average users don’t even know exist, let alone ever utilize, the software companies have weighed down our PCs to effectively neutralize their vast speed advantages. When we compare strictly common, everyday, basic user tasks between the Mac Plus and the AMD we find remarkable similarities in overall speed, thus it can be stated that for the majority of simple office uses, the massive advances in technology in the past two decades have brought zero advance in productivity.

And that’s just plain crazy.

Read the full article here: 86 Mac Plus Vs. 07 AMD DualCore.