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The journalist's Technology Wish
Randall Stross at the New York Times wrote yesterday that "e-mail has become the bane of some people’s professional lives" - including his own, since "the sight of two dozen messages awaiting individual responses makes me perspire." Ack. Yet another techie who hasn't yet learned the easy, common-sense, and permanent solution to email overload.
The rest of the article is an entertaining look at prolific letter-writers from the past, like Mencken and Edison, and how they managed the vast numbers of incoming communications.
But after stating his problem of email overload, Stross writes what techie columnists always seem to say: the Technology Wish. Which is, the tools will save us. As Randall put it...
Eventually, someone will come up with software that greatly eases the burden of managing a high volume of e-mail.
Or as celebrity tech blogger Michael Arrington put it - as I quoted him recently in A geek who can't use email:
The long term answer to all of this isn't that people need to try harder to respond to communication requests. The long term answer is that someone needs to create a new technology that allows us to enjoy our life but not miss important messages.
In other words: When, oh when, will the tools save us? Anything to let us keep our bad habits (and to give us a new gadget to write about).
A radically new material requires a new way of working. It happened with gunpowder, with steel, with paper - and it's happening again with bits. People need to change how they work to adapt to this new material. The old ways (of letting things pile up, and then complaining about it) don't apply.
Yes, tools are essential, and some tools are better than others - but the tech journalists are still missing the boat. They bear the responsibility for solving their problem. And it is possible, since email overload has already been solved. It's all in Bit Literacy.
5 Comments:
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Another tech journalist slammed by bits
Good Experience — Jun 4, '08 – 4:46 PM
Over at TechCrunch, yet another technology journalist admits that he......
Great post, Mark! It cracks me up when I see "techies" not knowing how to handle something like an email inbox and asking for a tool to manage it when books like Bit Literacy give them everything they need to know!
The technology DOES exist!
www.orla.org
I may just create an e-mail filter to delete all Good Experience newsletters that mention "Bit Literacy". We get it -- you wrote a book and it will save the world! Now, please stick to your more meaningful topics about experience design.
As I was reading this in the NY Times, a little voice in the back of my head kept saying "boy is Mark going to have something to say about this..."
Mark it has been a while since I read Bit Literacy so I could be wrong, but I think you kind of missed the point of the column. Insuring that only "important" messages get through can be addressed through technology and intelligent process. Mr. Stross acknowledged that, although your book was stupidly omitted. I presume you have sent him one!
However, managing the incoming stream is only half the problem, and importance is not the only thing that matters. The vexing part of the problem, the part that is now proving so difficult, is how to be appropriately RESPONSIVE. Or more pointedly, how to manage email like a human being rather than an automaton.
How can one be courteous and polite, particularly without the resources to afford a secretary? How can one pickup the non-urgent, non-important information that nonetheless we want to get, such as the email from a friend you haven't heard from in a while informing you about another friend that is ill? How do the informal "fabric of life" conversations (like the witty Mencken letters that the recipients cherish) occur when computers and filters are managing the communication paths?
Thanks .. take care.