Hello! I'm new here, so please forgive me if it's frowned upon to share things that you have yourself written. From what I've seen so far, Hubski seems to be an awesome, thoughtful community that has intelligent things to say—and we need more of that.
I recently published a post about the tools we use to think with; and how they haven't kept pace with the explosion of information brought on by the internet. What can we build that will "unblock" our mental pathways and allow us to become faster, clearer thinkers?
You take readers on a great journey in this piece. You selections of quotes is outstanding. I am endlessly fascinated with the constant transformation we see today. I'm young, but even the generation below me has grown up completely dependent on the internet for socialization, research, and everything in between. I was listening to NPR and they noted the old school way of "cruising" in cars and socializing has been completely replaced by social media services like Twitter and Facebook. At least I learned how to find and read a book in the library. As you pointed out, the problem with this is the inability to fully obtain and process the wealth of knowledge and information that is now available to us. We need to increase our capacity to deal with this information. We need to digest more of what we’re reading. We need the modern day commonplace book. This is the heart of the issue and reminds me of a couple recent things I read. Connected UX is by Aarron Walter (the Director of User Experience at MailChimp) and he talks about how he managed a team and figure out how to deal with the abundance of data. There is definite need for something to help people organize, collect and maintain their personal and professional lives. An organized system to bridge gaps between individuals, teams, communities. He turned to custom scripts, Evernote and gmail, but this isn't really a plausible solution to the majority. Really great read - I love reading about how people go about solving their problems. Our mentality hasn't yet adapted to a rapidly changing world is a recent exceptional Hubski post by SenecaYou can follow a trail at lightning speed,but can you really remember what you read last week? As Teresa Lunt observed on email, “Simply organizing information better, or enabling it to be searched better, doesn’t solve this problem.”
It was choking my productivity, and making my head spin. A friend of mine who’s helped many people tame their inbox and prioritize their work life recommended I simply nuke all of the emails and shut down the form. “If you can’t process the information, then stop wasting your time!” But my gut told me there was value in the feedback; I just wasn’t sure how to use it.
Your comment on the next generation reminds me of this: http://coding2learn.org/blog/2013/07/29/kids-cant-use-comput.../ It's a bit of a worrying trend. Both those links were fascinating reads, thank you for sharing! I love seeing these little ghetto solutions which spring up using existing tools. Writing emerged in much the same way--as volumes of transactions conducted in early agricultural settlements began to increase, merchants would use various marks to keep track; offloading their memory to an external "device." I do think the accelerating pace of change is a problem, and it worries me that the education system has not yet adapted. Ken Robinson did a great talk on the subject: http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_crea...
Kid's can't use computers Hubski Thread: http://hubski.com/pub?id=94931
Great writing Zygar, I think you chart the social, cultural, and technological development of information abundance (or infobesity) very well. Not only that, but you propose a very good solution to this information abundance and contextualize this with the analogous previous development of the printing press. The only thing I would add is that this information overload also fundamentally challenges the biological capacity of the human brain. No technological tool outside of the human body can solve the information abundance that will occur over the next 20, 30, 40 years. Also, welcome to hubski.
Thank you! It will be interesting to see what this future looks like. I suspect much of the non-biological augmentation will happen at an almost unconscious level; in the same way that our brain magically turns a series of upside down saccades into a continuous feed of the world around us. Right now we perceive a screen full of pixels as a single image, what will it be like when our brain perceives a whole field of knowledge as a single coherent entity?
I enjoyed the read, the idea of keeping a Victorian-style notebook is appealing, but obviously in this day and age would be cumbersome and not terribly practical. Having the online ability to collect pertinent information that is easy to use and could cross in to any platform online is an interesting thought. I have proposed the idea of "archives" on Hubski, which would be a way for hubski users to create dedicated spaces for specific content. ie. "Zygar's music archive" or Zygar's Physics Archive" etc. a place where you can take any Hubski content and curated in a way you see fit. You could have any number of these archives and they could be exportable. However, this would of course only apply to Hubski. What you are suggesting would apply to the entire digital space. It's an interesting idea. Also, original content is not only permissible on Hubski, but it is encouraged. Welcome to the community, I look forward to reading more of your work.
Thank you for the welcome and the kind words! We have a number of options available to us today--services like Evernote or Diigo have wide userbases and many evangelists. However, all of these tools are rooted in the same organisational conventions that we have been using since Gutenberg. Ted Nelson:
Hierarchical and sequential structures, especially popular since Gutenberg, are usually forced and artificial. Intertwingularity is not generally acknowledged—people keep pretending they can make things hierarchical, categorizable and sequential when they can't. We are, as individuals, stuck with filing cabinets, predicated on lists and folders and tags. Worse, we're pulling things OUT of their original context, a deeply intertwingled web, to drop them into these filing cabinets. And while lists are fantastic as a tool for curatorship (these Hubski archives you talk about are the quintessential anthology), often the true value or "location" of an idea only reveals itself over time. Every single "external brain" service I've used ends with an inbox 3,000 items deep. --- I have actually been working on the solution to this, in various forms, for about two years--with things starting to get serious over the last 6 months. We just recently launched the beta of a platform we're calling Twingl, which is kind of like a "Dropbox for Knowledge." Instead of organising stuff using tags and folders, you simply make synapses (Twinglings) between items. And instead of one monolithic app-to-rule-them-all, we are building the brain itself; with all of your ideas and connections available in a variety of specialised apps. The brain is still in utero at the moment (about 30 users so far); and is looking like this at Day 7 (with red dots being people, turquoise being comments, triangles being websites and yellow being highlighted bits of text.)EVERYTHING IS DEEPLY INTERTWINGLED. In an important sense there are no "subjects" at all; there is only all knowledge, since the cross-connections among the myriad topics of this world simply cannot be divided up neatly.
Twingl sounds like an interesting idea. I would guess it is only fully appreciated after using it. The image from the data of the 30 users is beautiful, if nothing else. Day 7? You're at the beginning of this portion of your journey of creating this, good luck. Any feedback from the people using it yet?
I've been using it for 24 hours and I'm into it. It's a much more organic way to save and organize my reading patterns online. I am looking forward to peaking back in a week, a month, or a year and see how my patterns have changed. Also, backlinking. When I link a comment on hubski to a quote in another article and then I reread the original article, it takes me back here. I just ended up back in this thread after noting a comment in "The future of software, the end of apps, and why UX designers should care about type theory" which brought me back to the medium article which brought me back here. That spiraling and revisiting is key to understanding and thinking and developing thoughts over a period of time. It is also something that rarely happens when I'm reading online. I read. I like. I share. I read the next one. Our brain is great at making connections. Comparing, contrasting, connecting is the core of how we form opinions and come to conclusions. The act of reading, highlighting and then linking is easy enough to be non-disruptive to the thought process but active enough to allow my mind to digest and acknowledge what I'm reading and acknowledge the connections I'm making as I read. Zygar Addition / More thoughts: The ability of reviewing and more fully processing my thoughts has become more and more apparent since I began using it. I find myself spiraling back to previous readings more and more and being more focused and intent while reading new things. I find that I the process of connecting things using Twingl has started to change how I think while reading. Instead of ignoring the connections I am semi-consciously making, which are usually seemingly random or pointless, I am more aware and thoughtful towards them. I no longer ignore them and instead seek out to compare this new information to things I already know. I highlight passages and sentences with the expectation that in the future I will link back to it and it will help my thoughts become more fully realized. The fact that I know that anything I highlight, be it boring or quite exceptional, will be saved in my Twingl forever* makes it feel a bit more worthwhile to read. I'm sure many know the feeling of reading late night or while at work and knowing that something is meaningful but simultaneously knowing you probably won't recall it in a couple days. You absorb it but it just sort of sits there until you forget about it. And this slowly makes you a bit more apathetic to really truly reading and thinking about stuff you read. Hubski makes the full articles and my thoughts more meaningful because I can share them with others, see other's interpretations, and discuss them. I enjoy looking back on the things I commented or posted weeks or months ago and recalling that information. TNG's archives have that same appeal to them - an online sort of journal capturing your travels and interests over time. Saving articles with apps like Evernote etc is cool, but you often don't really remember what or why or how you saved the article months later. I have been guilty of copy + pasting a passage to evernote, never to look or understand it again. Why did I save this? Who knows. With twingl your journey online and reading is something like a really badass journal. It keep track of as much or as little as you want it to. This journalling/recalling/reviewing process is really unique and cool. It's almost like having your own personal wikipedia or tvtropes. You could journey back through your online experience forever, hopping from note to note to note. The ability to view and journey through other user's twinglings would be fascinating. That sort of in depth voyeurism with thoughtful people is really appealing to me. All you know is this other person's journey. You know nothing about them, only the types of things they read and enjoy. I feel like I could get to know someone quite well by looking at their links and notes and comments.
Damn, thanks for the awesome writeup insomniasexx—it pretty much exactly captures the intent behind Twingl. There is something about the medium of the web that—even when you're actively working towards a goal, such as writing an article or planning a presentation—encourages wide reading, but not deep reading. We create bookmarks on the promise that we'll return to an article again later—but all you end up with is a 20 character title and a link—you lose all context. What is this link? Why did I bookmark it? When was I here? I grew somewhat phobic of bookmarking; knowing that if something went in there, it wasn't coming back out again. Tabs would stay open until I'd finished with them "permanently", but that's not how the creative process works—we work hard on a problem, get stuck, and retrace our steps, discovering insights that we hadn't seen before. thenewgreen, this week has been spent entirely on "getting out of the building" and talking to people; and most of the feedback has been either of insomniasexx's type, or a general sense of "ok this is a cool idea, but why would I use it?" Positioning is the big challenge at this point. P.S. The latest "brain" photo—19 days in! I'm the big cluster in the bottom left, insomniasexx is the third largest cluster just to the right. My co-founder is the huge one to the north. You can see some pretty interesting trends begin to emerge—like minded people naturally pull together because they are reading—and importantly, reacting to—the same things. It would be particularly fascinating to see the way a social network such as Hubski would self-organise in a system like this—I suspect individual online communities would start to resemble cities. You'd have the space geeks over here, the book club over there, etc.