I was just thinking looking at the flow of emails and conversations I am engaged in – life wasn’t so complicated and fast-pacd just a decade ago. The number of people I was in touch in (or knew), the number of things I had pending at many given point of time, the number of ideas floating around, the number of bought books to read – all seem to have gone up by a factor of 10 in the past 10 years.
And yet, we are essentially the same people and have the same amount of time. We do have a lot of technology to help us, but that only seems to have compounded the issue! What are the tips and tricks to managing in this new era? One of the things I’ve been thinking (which has been part of the motivation for the current tech Talk series on the Memex) is the ability to find people who are experts and trust their judgements and opinions (perhaps, where blogs came in). This is because we will simply not have enough time to go deep into a topic as we could have.
The Net, weblogs and email essentially weave a web around us where people, ideas and information are separated by a few degrees. While it is easy to think of all of us separated by six degrees (that is, we are no more than six connections away from anyone), in reality, our universe is perhaps no more than two degrees — if you aren’t a friend of a friend, you are essentially unknown to me. This could also apply to ideas.
Going ahead, I think we will build an ecosystem around us – of people, websites, blogs, ideas, information. When we want to find something or verify something, it is this group we will want to “search” first. This is the “context” of our life. The Memex needs to enable this.
