Archives / January 2004

Update April 2007: My new book, Bit Literacy: Productivity in the Age of Information and E-mail Overload, is now available.

Please get the book (see bitliteracy.com), practice it, and tell others.

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(Original column from 2004 follows below.)
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Over the years lots of readers have asked me to say a little more about bit literacy, so here's an overview.

I wrote this essay in May 2000. It was almost four years ago: before Congressional legislation against unwanted e-mail; before the TiVo became popular; before Apple's iPhoto was launched; before 12-year-olds got sued for downloading music.

Obviously, bits have become more important to the average technology user since then. In fact, I find that the essay - although it predates those developments - is even more relevant in 2004. Thus I plan to write more about bit literacy this year.

(About the essay: Richard Saul Wurman asked me to write this essay for inclusion in his book "Information Anxiety 2," a sequel to his seminal work from ten years before. This essay appears in the book on pages 6 and 7. Amazon sells the book: http://tinyurl.com/34gzr )

- Bit literacy -
by Mark Hurst
May 2000

Information anxiety is more important today than ever, thanks to the arrival of the bit. Ten years ago, Americans may have felt some anxiety over the magazines and newspapers piling up at home, but today the anxiety is increasing as bits appear in all areas of our lives. E-mail, websites, e-newsletters, chat rooms, e-mail, instant messages, and more e-mail -- all of these streams of bits can interrupt us, and keep us engaged, anywhere and anytime. Devices made to hold these bits are springing up, too: PDA's and cell phones bring us the bits when we're away from our PC.

For those who own a PC or a PDA, there is little escape from the bits. Even when we turn off the device, the bits pile up quietly, ready to flood us with anxiety when we return to the device. If anything, an escape from the bits can be dangerous. Take a week-long vacation without e-mail, and upon return, a bloated inbox welcomes us back to work with seven times more bits.

And this is still early in the current explosion of digital information. One research study recently predicted that, within a few years, the number of e-mails we each receive every day will increase to forty times its current volume. That's a lot of bits demanding our attention -- just from e-mail. It's likely that still other devices and other bitstreams will threaten the typical American with exponentially more information anxiety.

The problem of near-infinite bits, however, does have a solution. The solution is what I call "bit literacy." Bit literacy is an awareness of bits: what bits are, how they affect our lives, and how we can survive in a society permeated by bits. With that awareness, bit literate people are able to control the bits, and not be controlled by the bits, that are becoming central to our lives and jobs.

All of bit literacy can be distilled into a simple philosophy that allows people to regain their life, free from information anxiety, while still living in the bits. Here is the four-word philosophy:

Let the bits go.

That's right, let the bits go. Don't acquire them. Don't try to acquire them, and don't worry about acquiring them, since the bits will come to you. The bits touch our lives at so many points that it's impossible to escape them, and it's insane to try to acquire all of them. Instead, being bit literate means constantly working on letting go of as many of the bits as we can. Bit literacy allows us to clear a path of emptiness through the jungle of bits that surround and distract us; the emptiness allows us to see.

Here's a real-life example: Recently I visited a website where visitors can sign up to receive e-mail newsletters, published by respected companies, on any number of topics. Internet news, sports commentary, entertainment gossip -- all of these were available to me at the click of a button. I could get ALL of this information, delivered to my e-mail inbox weekly... for free! And unlike subscriptions to paper magazines, these bits wouldn't clutter my apartment or need recycling. (I didn't sign up; I was there to unsubscribe from a newsletter.) So, one might reasonably ask, what's the problem of getting some potentially valuable or entertaining bits, if they don't clutter my living space, don't weigh me down, and don't cost a penny?

The problem is that the bits are different from paper-based information. Bits are more engaging, more immediate, more personal, and more abundant than other types of information. In the middle of lunch with a friend, we're interrupted by bits -- perhaps a stock quote -- and we instinctively reach for our PDA to see what it is. Or we sit down to "read through some e-mail" and blow through two hours like it was twenty minutes. Like the magazines and other anxiety-producing information, the bits call for our attention -- but the bits call more loudly, more sweetly, more frequently, and in more areas of our lives.

These radically different qualities of bits mean that we must engage bits in a radically different way. Bit literacy is radical about letting the bits go. We can't let all the bits go -- we must engage them first, and inevitably save the few most important bits -- but our default behavior must be to let the bits go, rather than to acquire and save them.

Here are some ways you can let the bits go: Keep your e-mail inbox empty, by deleting your e-mails after saving the few that you must retain for later reference. Restrict the interruptions you allow on your cell phone and PDA, so that the interruptions that do come through are the important ones. And certainly don't open up any new bitstream -- a newsletter, a ticker, or any other ongoing feed -- unless it's vitally important. Instead, concentrate on letting go of the bits that find their way to you; the few remaining bits will be all the more valuable to you as a result.

I'd like to emphasize that last sentence: when a person becomes bit literate, what remains after all the letting go is valuable. I equate that with meaningful. Because -- and here's the kicker -- the bits by themselves aren't meaningful. Bits are just pointers to meaning, just containers of thoughts, just phantom images of the real item. The meaning is what lies behind the bits, what drives the bits. In their super-abundant quantities, swarming and overwhelming our consciousness, bits obscure the very meaning that created them. It's only after clearing out a path of emptiness that we can arrive at the meaning behind the bits.

This is true bit literacy: going through the bits by letting them go, then arriving at the meaning behind the bits. A common example is the employee's e-mail inbox that fills up with e-mail from numerous projects. The real issue isn't the number of e-mails coming in, but rather the number of projects that the employee signed up for. The meaning of the bits is not the bits themselves, but what they point to: in this case, the employee needs to commit to fewer projects

Bit literacy is uniquely suited to this moment in history. We have never needed bit literacy before, because the bits were never so numerous or engaging. Ten years ago we engaged bits through a "user interface" on a "personal computer." But the bits were bottled up, not very engaging, and couldn't touch us except when we sat in front of the screen. And there were so few bits that we could give each bit the individual attention it called for. Today, and much more so in a few years, the bits reach us even when we leave the computer screen. On every street corner, in every restaurant, in every house, while we eat, while we sleep, the bits pile up. And they call for us.

To have a chance to survive the infinite bits in the future, we'll need a lot of bit literacy: in our behavior (letting go of bits), in our beliefs (searching for the meaning behind the bits), and in our technology -- with simpler tools granting us control over the bits, and working with bits in their simplest formats. And as we shift to becoming not just consumers but creators of bits, the discipline of bit literacy will show us how to create bits differently: mindfully, meaningfully, and with an acceptance of their essential emptiness.

. . .

To start putting bit literacy into practice, read the book!
Bit Literacy: Productivity in the Age of Information and E-mail Overload

I have five ideas for you to consider this year. They're not exactly predictions - you can get those almost anywhere, this time of year - but rather thought-starters for you to consider as the new year begins.

Each idea is listed with pointers, if you're interested in learning or doing more.

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IDEA 1. Organization is the hardest part of user experience work.

This is an idea I've written about in the past, but it bears repeating as the primary challenge in creating good experiences: how do you work within the organization to get the change *made*?

This year, think about how to create positive change within the organization. Not merely to be *right* in the suggestions you make, but to actually create a tangible change with measurable results.

-> Pointers:

The Most Important User Experience Method

Top Sites' User Experience Teams and Their Challenge

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IDEA 2. The big picture is the only picture.

Many widely-used user experience methods ignore the big picture in favor of tiny, tactical details. My favorite example is the traditional task-based usability test, which presumes to define the tasks of the test before the customer even shows up - ignoring the "big picture" of the customer's context.

My colleague Josh Seiden compares it to sandpaper: if you're building a house, you wouldn't start with the fine-grain sandpaper - the logs aren't even cut yet! To build the house, you start with the "strategic" tools - blueprints, saws, hammers - then you gradually work down to the tactical level. It's impossible to build a house (or a customer experience strategy) out of fine-grained sandpaper (or task-based user tests).

-> Pointers:

Four Words to Improve User Research

The ROSE framework (read the "S" bullet!)

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IDEA 3. *Experience* is bigger than Web usability.

This year, make it a point to observe the experiences around you. Not just online, but everywhere. Certainly commercial experiences - shopping, travel, banking, health care, etc. - but elsewhere as well: what is your experience with art? Music? Architecture? The neighborhood where you live? And the central question - what makes the experience good or bad?

The key here is to understand that what you do at work - whether you're a marketer, designer, manager, usability practitioner, or anything else - concerns just a tiny piece of what *experience* actually is. I want the Good Experience newsletter to broaden your awareness about what "good experience" really means.

-> Pointers:

To explore the subject of good experience in all its forms, come to the second Gel conference in New York in April.

If you can't make it to Gel this year, you can still read the
transcripts of last year's Gel speakers.

If you see a bad experience, take a photo and send it in to
This Is Broken.

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IDEA 4. Blogs are just content management systems.

2003 was the year that weblogs broke into the popular press. Presidential candidate Howard Dean owes some of his recent success to his use of blogs and other technology. Several top journalists are using blogs to augment their regular columns.

But the popular conception of blogs - as online personal journals, with the most recent diary entry at the top - is a grossly limited vision of what this technology actually provides.

Blogs are actually just an easier-to-use version of the content management system, a tool that (albeit in a harder-to-use form) has been with us for years, in many environments, with a far greater impact than the online diary. There's nothing new about blogs except that they're easier than what was there before (which, in my book, is the single most important advancement any digital technology can make).

Watch this year - oops, is this a prediction? - for blog companies to pitch their software as CMS tools, not "blogs." Perhaps they'll drop the geeky "blog" term altogether, for uses outside diaries.

-> Pointer: Check out an unlikely use of the (excellent) Moveable Type system - a personal project of mine, the archives of sermons from the church I attend. (Note that the word "blog" appears nowhere on the page.)

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IDEA 5: Managing one's bits is an increasingly essential skill.

Last fall I began coaching a friend of mine on his bit literacy - the ability to manage one's bits: e-mail, pictures, files, contacts, calendar, applications,... everything that laptops and other digital devices might hold.

I've learned that bit literacy is a skill that most people don't have, and almost no one else is talking about. Yet it's an increasingly essential skill. We deal with more and more incoming bits every day - and not just spam mail. Bit literacy is the ability to manage it all and still be effective.

This idea is more of a resolution for me this year: to focus more on writing about bit literacy: what it is, why it's important, and how to attain it.

-> Pointer: Check out Hurst's Law, named recently in the EDGE Question Center (along with responses from Marvin Minsky, Howard Rheingold, Sherry Turkle, Craig Venter, and others). I'll write more about this another time...

And if you haven't read it yet, this is the beginning of bit literacy: the Managing Incoming E-mail report.