all things christo

While sharing a casual dinner with my fiancé recently, me fiddling around with my iPhone trying to answer some incoming mail, my fiancé alerted me on the fact that my attention was (obviously?) not focused on the right things. But for me, at the moment, her outlay on the struggles of Ingemar Bergmans maid, wasn't that important. Just as you would scroll by an article on a web page, or skip a track on an podcast, closing the tab in my browser, putting that IM-conversation on hold; I found myself "skipping that article" and focusing on what was important for me at the time; An email regarding the whereabouts of a certain hammer drill.

FAIL.

With Clay Shirky's words on my mind; It's Not Information Overload. It's Filter Failure. I find my self, unconsciously, adapting these information sorting techniques to my real life, social behaviour. Applying filters. Prioritizing my attention. Which is of course nothing new, but in this case, not socially accepted and seen as rude. But still, if I'm in information filtering -mode all day, it's inevitable. Mark as read. Go to next article.

Even if this incident is obviously just plain anti-social, as we spend more and more time online, I'm seeing that structural behaviours in our online presence is merging/spilling over to our offline social behaviours. IRL.We have adopted online slang to our every day vocabulary. Studies is showing that Instant access to information are changing our patience levels. We are now erasing the boundaries between private and public, thanks to services like Facebook and Twitter. As we are getting more sophisticated technology, making information available to us, ALL the time; at dinner, in meetings, at the movies, at school.

So. Is our handling of information overflow something to take offline? Is offline information, in social situations, more important than online information? Attention wise?

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I've been wearing your casual web development costume for years now, and produced my share of websites. Mostly the same kind of solutions, for the same kind of customers. This seems like something quite common. Joshua Porter deals with the subject, he refers to; The Agency Problem. And sure, you learn things on the way, but as you some of you know by now, you seldom get any real feedback from end users. Under a fixed period of time, you create something together and when your done you both go your separate ways. At deadline, hopefully, your client seems happy, and thats that. He pays your bills and you go on to work for another client.

Somewhere down the line I've realized that this is somewhat not an ideal solution for me. I need to develop something that will engage me over the boundaries of my company's deadline. I would like to get in touch with the users, talk to them and this way evolve as an developer and an architect.

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