Re-orientation

Feeling lost?

William James described infants’ earliest perceptions of the world as a “blooming, buzzing, confusion,” speculating that babies perceive the visual world as an unrelated, disorganized series of images rather than, as is the case for adults, a structured world composed of discrete objects and events. Alas, we are all babes in the woods of the world wide web.

Pre-web, we were accustomed to staying on top of the news by watching television, reading the newspaper, filtering magazines, and subscribing to email lists. Now, the torrent of information generated by the ever increasing stream of new developments has rendered this impossible. There’s so much flowing through the pipes and there are so many new pipes that old methods of keeping up no longer work very well.

Volume. The stacks of unread magazines and books in my office grow higher every day. Twenty new books stand unread on my “must-read” shelf. My RSS aggregator has 3,000+ unread items. My gmail inbox contains 12,000 unread emails. It’s overwhelming.

Location. One of my colleagues at togetherLearn voiced concern that it was disorienting to have our internal discussions spread over several social platforms, a standalone wiki, a persistent Skype chat, and email. And he was talking about ongoing conversations among four of us! My digital life is spread over dozens of locations, and you are probably in the same boat.

Tech savvy. Sometimes I feel like I am flying a plane blindfolded. I still don’t understand the Skype menu very well and finding stuff in Twitter often escapes me entirely. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing, and I admit to being a klutz with a dozen different online presentation platforms, another dozen discussion systems, and more than sixty online apps for drawing, mapping, searching, and sharing. Once I was a whiz with an excellent drawing tool; now I am a scribbler on six different drawing tools. And I’m still a novice with my Macs and iPhone.

Coping mechanisms

Let it flow. It pleases me to think of all of the passing information, entertainment, notifications, tweets, blogs, magazines, newspapers, and so on as a never-ending stream. When the spirit moves me, I dip a ladle into the rushing flow and lift out some bits. I no longer worry about missing things: the important stuff comes around again. And there’s no reason to clutter one’s head with water over the dam.

To work the flow, replace push (taking what’s thrown at you) with pull (being selective). My aggregators let me peruse things that interest me. I also cut de-clutter ruthlessly, unsubscribing from mail lists and unwanted subscriptions continuously. I’m trying to cut down on interruptions by paying less attention to the phone when it rings and withdrawing my email address from public pages.

When I’m lost amid a dozen simultaneous activities, I like to have an anchor handy. I frequently return to my navigation page.

The icons across the top take me to frequent destinations:  email, photos, to-do list, scratch pad, travel info, restaurant lists, search engines, dictionary, traffic conditions, Twitter account, and research page. Links take me to my blogs, tools, events, clocks, clubs, and communities. This is my usual on-ramp. It’s a wiki page, ever-changing, but it serves as my port in the storm.

My home page links to my public-facing material: blogs, videos, Flickr, SlideShare, popular articles, several communities, free chapters from Informal Learning, and so on.

When I’m looking for something beyond what Google or Wikipedia will find for me, I turn to my research page. The top section is Flow: aggregators; my favorite read is a river of learning news and I’m toying with Tony Karrer’s eLearning Learning, but often I click the link to FriendFeed or Twitter.  The Search section has a few specialty tools. For example, I set up a Google search that limits what it finds to learning voices I trust; another pulls answers only from people on John Hagel’s blogroll. The lower section, Stock, is for keepers. It’s a collection of links to things I revisit in Learning, Education, Business, Tech, Graphics, Writing, and personal stuff. Seminal documents and seminal video list things I’m forever pointing people to.

Other tools I could not do without: Google Desktop Search: find anything on your computer or web sites really, really fast. Mac Dashboard: the conversion widget is awesome. Google Docs: collaborative writing and MyDocs in the cloud.

To use Stowe Boyd’s metaphor, the web-of-pages is morphing into the web-of-flow. I’m still more about pages than flow, and it strikes me that the sweet spot is somewhere in between. All flow means not leaving anything memorable in your wake, but for innovation, conversation trumps writing essays. I’m still getting my sea legs on Twitter and am actively looking for a better live conferencing solution.

What do you do to keep up?