Posts Tagged 'history'

Royalty, too, has Information Overload!

Posted on April 23rd, 2011 · Posted in Analysis and Opinion

In the film Her majesty Mrs. Brown, we see a grieving Queen Victoria refusing to return to her duties in the years following the death of her husband, Prince Albert. The film has much else to recommend it, but as an Information Overload practitioner I couldn’t help but enjoy the moment when the Queen – played by Dame Judi Dench – angrily exclaims “my ministers send me letters to read – boxes and boxes of letters!“ This was before email, before Facebook, before our BlackBerry-distracted modern existence; and yet even then Management involved Information Overload – and even then, senior.. Read more

The ease of getting connected

Posted on January 6th, 2011 · Posted in Analysis and Opinion

Welcome to a new decade, promising ever more technological change! Here is one change that came to my mind: I remember, as anyone of my generation does, how you used to have to wait more than a year to have a phone line delivered by the state-run phone monopoly of the time. In fact, after I got married in the mid-seventies and waited a couple of years, I got a shared line with my absent-minded neighbor, who would forget to hang up after conversing… This is now a fading memory; these days, we take it for granted that we can.. Read more

Spelling for the new millennium

Posted on October 29th, 2010 · Posted in Off-topic

Tolerance to spelling errors changes as history progresses. For instance, in the middle ages nobody worried about spelling at all; I’ve read many a manuscript from six centuries ago (my wife is a historian researching that period) and the spelling of everything, even names of people and locations, is all over the place. As long as you could guess what is being referred to, nobody cared. The more precise attitudes of the 20th century would not tolerate this, so our spelling has become standardized, enabling us to play Scrabble and hold spelling bees. But the technology we use dictates our.. Read more

Information Overload before Email

Posted on September 23rd, 2010 · Posted in Impact and Symptoms

Real time communication over large distances has been around for millennia, if you count smoke signals and bonfire beacons; but it’s really taken off in the 19th century after the arrival of Morse’s Electric Telegraph in 1844. Suddenly it was possible to freely send text across the nation, and the new invention spread as fast as new wires could be strung up. Isn’t progress great? The transformation this brought to all aspects of life was sweeping, and is described in Tom Standage’s fascinating book “The Victorian Internet“. My favorite part of this book is the quote from a speech made.. Read more

The Warm Fuzzy factor in communications

Posted on August 12th, 2010 · Posted in Analysis and Opinion

These days I make a living helping people avoid spending all night on processing their email overload, so it was with some amusement that I remembered how I used to spend my own nights communicating with people – but enjoying every minute of it! This was back when I was in my teens and twenties, and I had a ham radio station I’d built myself (of course). I’d stay up late at night (when shortwave reception tends to improve) trying to connect to as many other radio amateurs in distant lands as I could raise in my earphones. It was.. Read more

The Dawn of the Blackberry Era

Posted on August 3rd, 2010 · Posted in Analysis and Opinion

Today RIM announced the BlackBerry Torch 9800, which is even more chock-full of amazing technology than the model before it, which was itself ahead of its predecessor, which was… This has been going on for a long time, but it reminds me that the sequence did have a beginning – yes, there was a first BlackBerry, which had perhaps appeared, fully formed, from the primordial chaos… I collect items from the History of Computing, and I have a sample of that earliest BlackBerry, the model 950, introduced in 1998, which you see in this photo. The interesting thing is that.. Read more

The curse of being in the know

Posted on July 28th, 2010 · Posted in Analysis and Opinion

The desire to “Be in the Know” has no doubt been around since our stone age ancestors had developed language. In addition to the actual value of the information, it meant being close to the seat of power, to where the decisions of the tribe or village or city-state were being made or influenced. It was a heady feeling and a powerful practical tool in social interactions; it could even be a survival skill. Unfortunately, this desire to share in the flow of information has taken a nasty turn when Information Overload came around. It used to be that in.. Read more

A blast from the past: weekly status updates

Posted on July 22nd, 2010 · Posted in Organizational Solutions

Periodic status reports are one area where you would do well to look for information overload improvement opportunities. In many organizations the network hums with daily reports, weekly reports, and monthly reports, often with large amounts of redundancy. Just take a critical look around you, or in the mirror… But something reminded me the other day of an extreme example of such redundancy, going back to 1982. I had just joined Intel and relocated to Silicon Valley for some on-the-job training, and among the many wonders of the American Way I was introduced to a wonderful method of sharing status.. Read more

Correspondence of yesteryear

Posted on April 27th, 2010 · Posted in Analysis and Opinion

I once told a friend of mine, a veteran engineer at Intel, that I found that people at Intel devote 20 hours a week to “Doing email”. His thoughtful response was “actually we always had this. We called it Correspondence”. Then he added, “and we devoted 2 hours a week to it”. Good point… I too remember those days at the start of my career. The correspondence consisted of messages – just like email – and it would come from inside and outside the workplace – just like email – and it would come on sheets of mashed tree pulp.. Read more

How info-starved were our ancestors?

Posted on February 14th, 2010 · Posted in Analysis and Opinion

“A weekday issue of the New York Times contains more information than the average person was likely to come across in an entire lifetime in the seventeenth century.” Variants of this statement (give or take a couple of centuries) are commonly seen when reading about Information Overload. Of course I agree that there’s more information available today than back in centuries past, but this particular statement always seemed suspicious to me. Is it true? And what if it is? First, it probably depends on what we mean by “information”. Is it printed information? In past centuries a sizable fraction of.. Read more