Praise for Information Bombardment
* From Management Gurus International:
Voted one of the World’s Top 30 Management Gurus
Bontis offers a broad overview of the information explosion and intelligent advice on how to avoid being suffocated by it.
As a technophile, Bontis feels the pain of those suffering from the excessive, indiscriminate need to consume today’s flood of information because he knows that information contains knowledge and in our knowledge-worker economy, knowledge is what we have to sell as employees. Still, too much information can be debilitating physically, emotionally and in our social and familial lives. The trick is to filter the important stuff from the noise.
Bontis, who writes in what is essentially a comfortable speaking voice, takes a leisurely and anecdotal approach to the issue of information bombardment. He paints the historical and technological background of the problem; draws attention to its manifestations on individual, group, organizational and institutional levels; provides numerous examples of his points; and then tenders quality prescriptions to control and facilitate the gathering of applicable knowledge.
Readers could simply jump to the last few chapters for Bontis’ toolkit, but his tour of the information highway is entertaining and instructive, gently meandering into neuroanatomy, Anglophonic pitfalls and more—at one point offering a dramatization of how a car crash might play out in the techno-soaked future—as he explores the reasons behind such knowledge-management snafus as the response to Hurricane Katrina and the BP oil spill. “In essence, we need to refine the amount and type of information pulled to us and pushed toward us at every instance…. Choosing which information arrives at your mental desktop is a conscious choice.”
He achieves his goal through a combination of software and social networking. The software includes e-mail-rule wizards, push alerts that garner targeted information and Wikinomics tools. He combines these with the human interactions of knowledge cafes (something like show-and-tell), knowledge auctions (rewards for sharing information) and alumni networks to keep all that accumulated knowledge capital in the flow after retirement. As a final piece of advice, he suggests learning to speed read. Thorough, practical and optimistic—stress relief for the info deluged.
—Kirkus Discoveries
Dr. Nick Bontis bombards us with a timely, informative, common sense tutorial on today’s information dilemma. Technological changes, too much information, too many unknown sources, and the decline of face-to-face communication have changed the way we receive and disseminate information. I travel over 200 days a year and am seldom in the same time zone as my office. I depend on technology to receive and send accurate, current, concise, confidential and relevant information. Nick’s book is a must-read for all my senior staff! On a personal note, I have experienced many times Nick’s passion for the art of communication and his ability to convey his approach to information management both to large audiences and in boardroom settings. Most importantly, whether it’s in person or in this book, he delivers his essential message in a way that we can all understand.
—Ron Foxcroft, founder and CEO, Fox 40 International
Information Bombardment
Rising Above the Digital Onslaught
By Nick Bontis Ph.D.
Copyright 2011, 2012 Nick Bontis
Published by Institute for Intellectual Capital Research at Smashwords
Smashwords Edition License Notes:
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
This book is dedicated to my “big fat Greek family”:
May we continue to enjoy each other under the warmth of the sun, and may God bless our health and happiness.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Chapter 1: Seeking Balance in a Digital Storm
Chapter 2: Phoenicians, Gutenberg and the Mark I
Codification Shift #1: The Alphabet
Codification Shift #2: The Printing Press
Codification Shift #3: The Computer
Chapter 3: I’m Thirsty—More Knowledge, Please
Knowledge As a Means of Survival
Allocating Your Attention Span
Chapter 4: Cumulative Codified Information Base
Human Capacity for Information
Computer Capacity for Information
Chapter 5:The Marginal Cost is Zero
Chapter 6: Nobody’s Job Is Safe
Getting Comfortable With Change
The Invisible Threat of Industry Displacement
Chapter 7: The Digital Blitzkrieg
Chapter 8: Democratization and Super-Penetration
Democratization of Information
The Phenomenon of Super-Penetration
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly of the Internet Age
Chapter 9: Are You Sure You Can Read?
False Assumption #1: Everyone Around You Can Read
False Assumption #2: English Is the Most Common Language
False Assumption #3: Language Skills Don’t Require Practice
Be Proactive by Advancing Your Literacy
Chapter 10: My Home Is My Castle
The Role of Television in the Home
The Role of Computers in the Home
Home: A Sanctuary or a Thoroughfare
Chapter 11: What Did My Toilet Just Say?
Radio Frequency Identification Tags (RFID Tags)
GPS (Global Positioning System) Devices
Chapter 12: Car Accident (A Fable)
Chapter 13: Impact at the Individual Level
The Push and Pull of Information
Chapter 14: Impact at the Group Level
Culture’s Influence Over Knowledge Sharing
Factors Encouraging Knowledge Sharing
The Inherent Natures of Group Members
Chapter 15: Impact at the Organization Level
Threats to Organizational Learning
Chapter 16: Impact at the Institutional Level
Institutional Knowledge Management
A Culture of Information Sharing
Institutions Are Ultimately Composed of Individuals
Costs of Poor Knowledge Management
Chapter 17: Individual Prescriptions
Chapter 18: Group Prescriptions
Dynamic Corporate Yellow Pages
Chapter 19: Organizational Prescriptions
Chapter 20: Institutional Prescriptions
More Praise for Information Bombardment
Designing Our Lives for the Networked Age
For three decades I’ve written about the challenges of thriving in the information shower of the Digital Age. But today something extraordinary is happening: the continuous quantitative changes are becoming a qualitative change.
Information and computing technologies are moving on to “the second half of the chessboard”—a clever phrase coined by American inventor and author Ray Kurzweil. He told a story about the emperor of China, who was so delighted with the game of chess that he offered the game’s inventor any reward he desired. The inventor asked for rice.
“I would like one grain of rice on the first square of the chessboard, two grains of rice on the second square, four grains of rice on the third square, and so on, all the way to the last square,” he said. Thinking this would add up to a couple of bags of rice, the emperor happily agreed.
He was misguided. While small at the outset, the amount of rice escalated to more than two billion grains halfway through the chessboard. The final square would require nine billion billion grains of rice—enough to cover all of earth.
After decades of doubling and redoubling, we’re now achieving gargantuan leaps in all facets of information technologies, such as processing power, storage capacity and bandwidth. Examples are everywhere, from Intel’s computer chips to low-cost consumer electronics. When the MP3 player debuted in 1998 it stored less than a dozen songs. Now 160-gigabyte iPods store 40,000 songs.
Google CEO Eric Schmidt noted that between the dawn of civilization and 2003 there were five exabytes of data collected (an exabyte equals one quintillion bytes). Today five exabytes of data gets collected every two days. Soon there will be five exabytes every few minutes. It’s an understatement to say that we’re in danger of drowning.
But there is more to this than information overload. Because of the mobile Internet and the rise of pervasive computing, the shower continues all day long. Soon everything will be constantly connected to the Internet, including us. The growing number of little gadgets we carry will soon morph into one uber-gadget that is constantly online. These little Blackberrys/personal digital assistants/digital cameras/MP3 players/video cameras/GPS devices will continue to shrink in size and increase in functionality and ease of use.
Today this is obvious when your lunch companions check their Blackberrys for messages. But soon you won’t be able to tell that they’re even doing this. Their eyeglasses will have little video screens that can bring up any image they want. While you talk, they can check their e-mail or watch the news. Of course you can do the same, calling up the text of Macbeth when you think dropping some Shakespearian bon mot will impress your audience.
Most of us wonder what this environment is doing to the way we process information, learn and even think. Young people—digital natives—seem to be more adept at dealing with this new environment. I’m hopeful that the changes to their brains, caused by their growing up digital, will be positive ones. But many people worry and justifiably so, as there is much that we don’t know about the human brain and human behavior. Will we all end up in “the shallows,” as Nicholas Carr describes them, where we lose our capacity for deep thought? Will we abandon reading deeper and longer works and end up flittering around from one data source to another like a bee in a garden of flowers? Will this affect our relationships with others as we are consumed by thousand of weak social-media ties and have less time for those we love? Will this new world change not only how we think and relate but how we are—and the values we have and stand for?
I’ve written that we need to adopt a much more take-charge attitude about how we manage these tools and all this information, and, for that matter, how we live. More than ever before we need to step back and consciously design our lives. We need to decide explicitly what we stand for and whether we are the slaves or the masters of the new technologies.
When I was a kid, life for my parents was blissfully simpler. There was one daily newspaper in our house and three television channels. Dad went to work. Mum didn’t. Workers put in their hours in factories or planned their days at the office, and the only source of interruption was the telephone. We had clear values—taught by our mothers in our homes and reinforced weekly at church. There was no pornography in the house or, for that matter, even on the newsstands in our town. This was the late ’50s, and the cause célèbre was whether Ed Sullivan would show Elvis grinding his pelvis on his hugely popular Sunday night variety television show. The decision: no. All images of Elvis were from the waist up.
Smart companies are taking initiatives to help their employees cope with the new technology-rich world. They train their employees in time management and in becoming members of a values-based enterprise. They ensure that integrity is part of their corporate DNA. They design business models, structures and processes to ensure that work systems best serve the organization and maximize the effectiveness of its people.
Smart people and families should do the same. On the personal front, most of us, in our daily lives, in our work and in our families, muddle through this new data-rich, networked world, hopping from device to device, app to app, decision to decision or crisis to crisis without an overarching strategy. All of us should be applying principles of design to our lives and making conscious choices about how to upgrade our capacity to filter data, when we should use new technologies and what we believe in.
Adopt a values statement for yourself and your family—and constantly revise it as the world and conditions change. Don’t complain about technological overload. Know how to adjust and even turn off the shower. Harness the power of new technologies and transparency for the good; design them rather than letting them control you.
I hope you find Information Bombardment: Rising Above the Digital Onslaught to be a helpful contribution to this rather epic challenge.
—Don Tapscott
Don Tapscott is the author of fourteen books including MacroWikinomics: Rebooting Business and the World (with Anthony D. Williams). He is an adjunct professor at the Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto.
I have been wanting to write this book for a while. But I could never find the time. It seems that we all have the same challenge. Our lives are so busy. Since the first of my three children arrived several years back, I have been in pursuit of what I believe is the ultimate quest: how do I work smarter, not harder? This way, I can spend my time doing the really important things in life.
This book is about getting closer to that pursuit. The target reader for Information Bombardment is the modern knowledge worker with several e-mail accounts, the latest smartphone and an insatiable appetite to know—that is, to consume all available information. Unfortunately, while we pursue all the bounty of the digital world, we fail to realize the accompanying negative consequences. Why can’t we sleep at night? Why do my fellow employees fail to collaborate with each other? Why can’t my organization tap into to all of its cumulative expertise? Why did it take so long to respond to Hurricane Katrina?
While there are numerous books that discuss the knowledge economy, mobile technology, knowledge management and even intellectual capital, this is the first practitioner-focused book to address why we yearn for information to the point of unhealthy and unproductive bombardment. More importantly, this book provides some guidance about what we can do about this problem moving forward.
A knowledge worker (i.e., the typical reader of this book) is defined as someone who is valued for her ability to interpret information like a lawyer, a nurse, a researcher or any office worker. She consumes at least three times as much information as a generation ago and, while working in front of a computer, she can multitask across thirty-six applications in an hour. She is not afraid of digital technology and is often the first to own the latest gadget, which she uses to collaborate with her online community. She is the subject of my analysis.
At the individual level, I am very interested in the impact of all of this information bombardment on her health, her brain and her relationships. At the group level, do her friends share everything with her or do they choose to hoard certain tidbits of information? At the organization level, how does her firm leverage her full intellectual capital potential? Finally, how can her knowledge-sharing behaviors influence institutions and society at large?
This book is divided into three parts. Part one addresses the context and issues related to information bombardment (chapters one through eleven). Part two provides implications of the impact of information bombardment at multiple levels of analysis: individual, group, organization and institutional (chapters twelve through sixteen). Finally, part three provides actionable prescriptions that you can follow for all levels of analysis (chapters seventeen through twenty).
A QR Code is a two-dimensional barcode that is readable by smartphones. Scanning the QR codes at the end of chapters and sections in this book will conveniently point the browser on your mobile device to the specific website that will provide you with further information.
To download a QR code reader for your smartphone:
Step 1: Pick one of the following URLs listed below based on the model of your smartphone and insert it in the browser of your mobile device.
Motorola, Nokia, Sony Ericsson
iPhone, BlackBerry, Samsung, Siemens
Asus, Dopod, Hewlett Packard, LG, O2, Palm, Panasonic
For most other manufacturers
Try searching “QR code reader” on www.google.com for others and check out the App Store for Apple products and App World for RIM products
Step 2: After downloading and installing the appropriate QR code reader for your smartphone, launch the application and steadily place it above the QR code for a few seconds.
Step 3: Test your application with the following QR code which should take you directly to the book’s main website www.InformationBombardment.com
I have received a great deal of emotional and intellectual support while writing Information Bombardment. For every person acknowledged, scores of others go unmentioned. I am grateful to all of them.
First, I would like to thank my speaking agents: Martin Perelmuter at Speakers’ Spotlight (www.speakers.ca/bontis_nick.html) in Toronto and Wesley Neff at the Leigh Bureau (www.leighbureau.com/speaker.asp?id=341) in New York. They both advised (yelled at) me on numerous occasions over the last several years to shut up and just write the damn book. Well, finally I did.
Second, thanks to my academic colleagues who provide conceptual stimulation and a constant reminder why research and teaching must go hand in hand. Hearty handshakes go out to Mary Crossan, Chris Bart, Peter Vilks, Alexander Serenko and Paul Bates. Plus, a shout out to all of my past, current and future students. Thanks for allowing me to shape your minds three hours at a time.
Third, I would like to acknowledge my business partners, through whom I learn to apply my crazy ideas. High fives go out to Don Tapscott, David Brett, Jac Fitz-enz, Michael Kovacs and anyone else who has entrusted me for consulting services. I truly appreciate your business.
Finally, my sincerest gratitude goes to the editing, production and marketing team that helped transform this book from idea to reality. Cheers go to Doug Childress, James Uttel, Jessica Gorham, Olga Vladi, Larry Leichman, Andrew Carreiro, Ryan Burgio and Sourov De. Weren’t those weekly Skype calls just awesome?
Dr. Nick Bontis is the world’s leading expert on intellectual capital and its impact on performance. He helps organizations leverage their most important intangible asset for sustainable competitive advantage.
Nick has been immersed in the field since 1991, when a cover story in Fortune magazine, titled “Brainpower,” changed the course of his life. Risking a secure future, Nick left a promising banking career to pursue a PhD in the field. His groundbreaking doctoral dissertation went on to become the number one-selling thesis in Canada. At a relatively young age, his accomplishments thus far could fill a volume.
As a professional speaker, Nick has delivered keynote presentations on every continent for leading organizations in both the private and the public sectors. His dynamic, high-energy presentations provide personal and team recommendations for improving individual and organizational effectiveness, leaving audiences with the tools, inspiration and impetus to accelerate performance. His customized programs are a mix of practical managerial tools, rigorous academic research, strategic consulting, entertaining humor and a blast of youthful exuberance.
As an academic, “Nicky B” (as he is known by his students) is an award-winning, tenured professor who delivers enlightening content with energy that virtually zings off the walls when he steps into a room. He currently teaches strategy to undergraduates, knowledge management to MBAs and advanced statistics to PhD students at the DeGroote School of Business, McMaster University. He has won over twelve major teaching awards and was named faculty researcher of the year twice. Maclean’s magazine has rated him as one of McMaster’s most popular professors for six years in a row! TVO recognized him as one of the top ten lecturers in Ontario. OUSA awarded him Ontario’s top professor award. He is also a 3M National Teaching Fellow, an exclusive honor only bestowed upon the top university professors in the country!
Nick earned his PhD from the prestigious Ivey Business School, University of Western Ontario, where he received the university’s top scholastic achievement award. He also won a Canadian silver medal in the running long jump with a remarkable leap of seven and half meters—that’s nearly twenty-five feet! Nick also competed on the UWO varsity men’s soccer team, receiving both MVP and leading goal-scorer honors. As an athlete, Nick received national all-star status and several high-profile awards all while performing in the UWO symphony band as a euphonium player.
As a consultant, Dr. Bontis is the director of the Institute for Intellectual Capital Research—a leading strategic management consulting firm. His services have been sought after by leading organizations such as the United Nations, Microsoft, Health Canada, Royal Bank, Telus, Accenture, the US Navy and IBM. Tom Stewart, former editor of the Harvard Business Review and Fortune magazine, recognizes him as a “pioneer and one of the world’s real intellectual capital experts.” Nick is also on the advisory boards of several organizations, including a variety of educational-based institutions designing and implementing executive development programs across the country. He is also on the board of Hillfield Strathallan College—one of Canada’s leading independent schools, and Harvest Portfolios Group—an investment firm located in Oakville, Ontario.
As a writer and associate editor of the Journal of Intellectual Capital, Nick has won international acclaim for his groundbreaking research papers and management cases. He is ranked as one of the most-cited authors on intellectual capital and knowledge management in the world. As an entrepreneur, Nick is chief knowledge officer of Knexa Solutions—the world’s first knowledge exchange and auction, based in Vancouver. Canadian and US patent applications have been filed for Knexa’s dynamic pricing system.
Dr. Bontis also draws on his wealth of practical, hands-on business experience. He started his career at Human Resources Development Canada and later at KPMG. He then moved on to work for several years at CIBC Securities, Inc. in a variety of areas including marketing, securities analysis, recruitment, strategy and software development. He received the CIBC Chairman’s Award for outstanding contribution to the bank.
With his unique combination of substance and sizzle, Dr. Bontis is guaranteed to ignite, entertain and enlighten audiences, empowering them with both the tools and the inspiration to perform at a higher level of accelerated performance. He currently resides in Ancaster, Ontario, with his wife Stacy and their three young children, Charlie, Dino and Tia Maria.
Please visit the following links:
www.InformationBombardment.com
www.youtube.com/NickBontisMedia
Chapter 1
Seeking Balance in a Digital Storm
The day was absolutely perfect. My family and I arrived on the island of Santorini in the middle of the Aegean Sea. If you have never been to this little piece of paradise, I encourage you to do so if you get the chance. Sculpted out of one of the earth’s largest-known volcanoes more than 3,500 years ago, Santorini is a small archipelago off the coast of Greece. Layers upon layers of different-color lava rock form ledges of terrain filled with cascading villas leading downward to the ocean. The glistening views from the whitewashed-stone terraces are spectacular, and the sunsets over the volcanic caldera are breathtaking. It has always been one of my most favorite places in the world.
My wife and I, as well as our three children, were making our annual summer escape to the island. But the day wasn’t to be as perfect as I thought. Despite having physically escaped Ontario, there was still a chunk of me that couldn’t leave. I hadn’t checked my e-mail in over forty-eight hours, and I was about to go crazy. All those important messages and pieces of information that I fictionalized in my head were simply sitting in my inbox unattended. But there was another problem: on this exquisite Greek island, amidst the lavish beaches and gentle breeze, I couldn’t get any reception on my BlackBerry. How was I going to find out what I was missing without connectivity? I needed information, and I had been cut off. I was severed from the digital world!
“Daddy, come play soccer with me,” Charlie, my older son, begged, tapping on my leg.
“Hold on,” I replied. “Give me just a second. I’m trying to get some stock market quotes off my phone.”
“Let’s search for seashells, Daddy,” came another request from Dino, my younger son.
“Can my dolly swim with us?” piped in my daughter, Tia Maria.
“Nick,” my wife Stacy called from a few yards away, “what are you doing? Let’s take a walk down the beach and catch the sunset.”
“Just a second, everybody,” I said, trying to buy some time. “I think I am getting a signal. I will be done soon.”
I missed the sunset, regarded as one of the most romantic in the world. I missed an opportunity to play soccer, collect seashells and swim in the water. I lost these precious moments with my family on one of the most beautiful islands in the world. For what? For the endless search of knowledge. Or, better yet, for the need to quench my incessant addiction to information. I was held hostage by digital chains. I was craving my data fix as if it were air, food and water, yet in the process I failed to balance the most important things in my life.
Think back to the apex of the industrial era circa the mid-1960s. Steel workers at Dofasco, one of my hometown’s largest employers, would go to the factory when the whistle blew. At day’s end, the whistle would blow again, signaling them to go home. At night the workers would spend time with their families and then enjoy some leisurely pursuits. But when does the whistle blow today? Honestly, the whistle blows only if we shut off our smartphones. Most of us have more attentive relationships with our BlackBerrys than we do with our spouses and friends.
“Good morning, my love. Do you have any e-mails or alerts for me this morning? How’s your battery, sweetheart? Are you feeling well connected?”
The first thing we do when we wake up and the last thing we do before going to bed is check our inboxes. Is it absolutely necessary that we yearn for a quick glimpse just to make sure some juicy piece of information didn’t come across that might suddenly change our lives? Digital devices have crossed all boundaries of our lives, and some of us can’t live without them. While we suffer from the dangers of a crackberry addiction, how do we achieve a healthy work-life balance?
Santorini is actually thought by some historians to be the long-lost island of Atlantis that was written about by Plato in the fourth century BC. A tremendous volcanic eruption left only an island remnant of what was once a thriving Minoan civilization. But eventually Hellenization spread back into the area, and great thinkers and philosophers like Plato, Aristotle and Socrates dreamed of a flourishing utopian society that would be the genesis of civilization. They sought knowledge and wisdom, or what the Greeks referred to as sophos, believing this was the key to progress. Yet there I was, ignoring the things that should have been important to me in exchange for the promises of a handheld device. On one end of the spectrum, I was surrounded by the genesis of civilized culture amidst the azure waters of the Aegean Sea, and on the other end I stood with my BlackBerry raised to the sky, trying to get a signal. Is this what my ancient Greek forefathers envisioned?
The Kaiser Family Foundation recently released a study that found the average young American spends more than seven hours a day using some type of electronic device. Facebook, Twitter, instant messengers and smartphone apps are just the most recent newcomers to the attention-grabbing environment of today. Technological advances have allowed us to be connected constantly to streams of information from around the globe so that we don’t have to miss a binary beat. We are literally bathing ourselves in bits, and some of us are drowning.
What drives us to do such a thing? Do we really gain that much more from interfacing with a cold, hard piece of metal than with other people? Some people would say definitely yes. Without question we have entered the knowledge era and left the industrial era and agricultural era behind. No longer do we use our brawn and physical skills to harvest the land. Instead, we use our brains. Without knowledge we are left defenseless. Ignorance carries a huge price tag in the knowledge era. If you’re left out of the loop, it is likely you’re going to be left behind.
The big problem is that most of us have no idea how to filter, organize and prioritize all the information we receive. While much information is useful, we are constantly being bombarded with a huge amount of noise. Junk mail, spam, sales pitches, gossip and propaganda saturate our attention spans. If you were to open up a new Hotmail account today, it would take on average about eight minutes before you received your first spam mail. More than likely it would be about how cheaply you can buy Viagra or about some guy in Nigeria who is in dire need of your financial support. How many of these e-mails do we need?
The bottom line is that we cannot help ourselves. We are so fearful of being left out that we sacrifice things that are important to us simply in order to stay informed. That means we have left the door open for information bombardment to occur. With more than a billion Internet users in the world, there are plenty of eager people to provide you with vast amounts of information—both useful and useless. Unless we learn to get a handle on how to discern the quality of this information and our real need for the information, the negative effects of information bombardment are bound to happen. In fact, they already have.
I didn’t really need to check my inbox on vacation. All of my colleagues knew I was away on holiday. Nothing was pressing whatsoever. Yet this need to know had somehow become more important to me than spending time with my family or even allowing myself to relax. The longer I went without an Internet connection, the more anxious I became. The more anxious I felt, the harder it was to relax and enjoy myself. I had become addicted to knowing the latest and greatest piece of information that might have come across my path. I had allowed my inbox to be more important than anything else. I was bathing in bits and drowning. Meanwhile, my family was starving for another scarce resource.
If you take a survey and ask a thousand people what the most limited resource is today, the majority will respond by saying “time.” But time doesn’t change. Time has always been the same. You don’t have more time one day and less the next. There are always twenty-four hours in a day, sixty minutes in an hour and sixty seconds in a minute. Therefore, time cannot be more or less scarce with each passing generation or even millennium. Time is limited, but it is constantly limited to the same degree. Time isn’t the primary problem, however; how we use our time is.
In the knowledge era, our attention spans are the scarcest resource. Do I give 100 percent of my attention to my boss as he speaks at a corporate luncheon? Or do I share my attention between him and my e-mails as they come across my BlackBerry? If I share my attention between both, then I get rewarded by being more efficient and more productive. This, in turn, may lead to a promotion or greater opportunities for me. Today, incentives are in place that encourage me to share my attention among different and sometimes competing demands. The amount of time I have doesn’t change, so how can I get more out of time? Easy: split my attention by optimally allocating my priorities. This is more commonly referred to as multitasking.
I have a theory. I believe that one’s age is inversely proportionate to the number of windows that are simultaneously open on one’s desktop computer. For example, my father Harry is a successful accountant who taught himself how to use a computer in his sixties. On an average day at work I have watched him open his Outlook and read e-mails from his clients. Then he closes Outlook to open up a Google search browser to find the phone number of his favorite restaurant on The Danforth (Toronto’s Greek area). Then he closes the browser and opens a media player to listen to Paschalis Terzis (his favorite singer). The peculiar part of this whole process is that only one window is open at a time.
In contrast, my first-year university students typically have ten or more windows open simultaneously as they write up their assignments in Word, crunch some numbers in Excel, surf the Web, post photos on Facebook, burn a CD, download an MP3 file, tweet their emotions and more. Over the past couple of generations, the environment has rewarded those who compartmentalize their attention spans into small chunks and multitask. Today, a whole generation of children naturally multitask because it is a sign of the times. They have grown up us digital multitaskers.
But multitasking has had its costs. My children are starving for my attention. My wife spends romantic sunsets on immaculate beaches without me holding her. And, deep down, though I refuse to hear it, a small voice within me is screaming for some exhalation and relaxation. Instead, I choose to give the bulk of my attention to a silicon chip within a plastic case connected to streams of data that I do not even truly need. Like many of you, I have been socialized into feeling that these bits of information are critical to my survival. So I give them my attention while relationships and quality of life suffer. Have you tried cuddling in bed with your BlackBerry lately?
Back in the days of the agricultural era, multigenerational families worked together on farms to grow crops that fed the population. In the early twentieth century, thirty million people provided food for 100 million Americans. But over the ensuing decades, guess what happened? The children of these farming families learned to read, to write and to think. Seemingly overnight, there was an exodus of farm workers as young, bright men and women chose to pursue other professional careers.
Did the world then starve? No. Technology came to the rescue with new farming equipment (e.g., bulldozers, genetically modified seeding systems, and irrigation architecture designed by these newly educated men and women that could more efficiently and effectively assist with food production). By the end of the twentieth century, ten million people could now feed over 300 million Americans. Who could argue that technological advancement wasn’t a good thing?
To a point, innovation is certainly a wonderful thing. However, at some point we begin to give away too much of ourselves in the process. Today, we have satellite and cable television systems that provide us with dozens if not hundreds of channels to sample. We have satellite and Web-based radio that let us choose a specific genre of song anytime we want. Of course, with the help of Google, our ability to search for any answer with the tapping of a few keys places us in the midst of a sea of information. This all sounds good, right?
Let me pose a question to you: Do you think it is simply a coincidence that the rise in ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder) over the last thirty years occurred during the same time that society experienced an explosion of information? I don’t. I remember how when I was a kid, there were less than ten channels on our RCA television set. If I wanted to change the channel, I had to get my lazy self off the couch and rotate the dial. As a result, I would endure long segments of time viewing one program without shifting my focus of attention. Today, with a universal remote control in my hand, I find I spend only a few minutes at best on a channel before moving to another. Or, better yet, my kids use the picture-in-picture functionality of a 1080p 3D LED display to watch five channels simultaneously (of the several hundred available) in rich 9.1 Dolby digital surround sound.
The infusion of information into our environments has forced us to share our attention, and it has taught us to become better multitaskers. But in addition it has taught us how to rapidly shift our attention from one item to the next. Did you know that most people can scan an e-mail’s sender and its subject line and decide whether or not to delete it within 1.2 seconds? Pretty cool skill, eh? No one taught us that in school. But while that is extremely efficient, the act enforces brief bursts of attention. It is becoming harder and harder to attain skills in focused and long-lasting periods of concentration. This is the kind of attention my wife and kids are craving.
Why do I keep clicking forward through the television channels even though I find a show that is somewhat intriguing? The answer is the same reason why I am dying to get a signal from my BlackBerry on vacation: I don’t want to miss any little juicy piece of information or entertainment. There is always something better on television than what I am currently watching! Technology has enabled us to have access to vast amounts of variety within multiple forms of communication. Yet without the ability to filter and prioritize this information, the same technology is causing our quality of life to decline.
Technology has always caused paradigms to shift, but some of technology’s promises have not always been true. Do you remember the big promise technology made when the computer replaced the typewriter?
“Think of all the paper we will save. Everything will be stored and transferred electronically, so all that waste will disappear. We will all work in paperless offices!”
This has hardly been the case. We currently use more than 100 million tons of paper each year in the US alone. When you check in at the airport, in most cases you still must go to a kiosk to print out your boarding pass to get through security. Despite your medical records at your doctor’s office being electronically stored, health-care payers often still require paper documents to justify proposed charges. Instead of saving paper and allowing society to become paperless, electronic technology has done the opposite. Even though we may print out a smaller percentage of the total stored information available, the entire quantity of information has risen exponentially. The end result is that we have more paper floating around than ever before.
While information bombardment and the demands of attention sharing are evident in recent technological advances, technology is also rapidly replacing—or displacing—many areas once thought to be ruled only by the human brain. Stories about machines replacing factory workers are nothing new. Likewise, machines eliminating positions that primarily organize, categorize or distribute products are quite common. But what about machines that can actually think?
In 1997 IBM designed a machine called Deep Blue that successfully competed against the world’s best human chess player. Compared to other computers, its processing power allowed it to calculate up to 200 million chess moves in a second, and it could anticipate all potential permutations up to twenty moves ahead. Garry Kasparov, the reigning world grandmaster, took on Deep Blue in a six-game match. In the end, Deep Blue successfully beat Kasparov after the champion made an early mistake in the last game. It was the first time a machine had ever accomplished this feat.
Do you think it is impossible for computers and their artificial intelligence to surpass the capacity of the brain? Let’s think about this in practical terms for a moment. The brain has approximately 100 billion nerve cells called neurons. At a base level, it is safe to assume that each neuron has a storage capacity of at least one byte of information. That means the average brain can store at least ten gigabytes even before we consider connections between neurons. If you then add the ability to store information between neurons in neural networks, experts estimate the total brain capacity may be as high as 1,000 terabytes (a terabyte is 1,000 gigabytes!). That is a huge amount of storage ability and processing power.
Certainly there is no way a computer processor and storage device could house that much information. Wrong. The Library of Congress and many other large databases are rapidly approaching this figure. Ancestry.com reports a total storage capacity of 600 terabytes after it added US census data from 1790 through 1930 to its online database. Its total figure is rapidly approaching the theorized total brain capacity to hold and process information. It’s no wonder we are beginning to feel the effects of information bombardment. I’m getting a headache just thinking about it.
As nanochips get smaller and the devices we use become more powerful and faster, it is likely that these devices will begin interacting and communicating amongst themselves. Not only will we have information from other people to digest but we will also have an entire new body of artificial intelligence to keep up with. Think about it: is your life better as a result of all the technology around you? Or has it simply provided a way with which to bombard you with more information in a shorter amount of time? If quality of life is truly better, then we should all be enjoying the pleasures and sunsets of Santorini.
Ever since the development of the Internet, a great deal of buzz has been publicized about being informed about your own health. You should know about any disorders you have, the side effects of your medications, your family history and more. An informed patient knows the right questions to ask his or her doctor before they even meet. Yet the ironic thing is that information itself is one of the biggest health risks today. Our constant thirst for information places demands on us mentally that affect us over the long term.
Did you know that thirty percent of the population in all industrialized societies suffers from some type of insomnia? Almost one in every three people! More than ninety percent of these people cannot sleep because of stresses occurring in their lives. They may have had a recent emotional loss or experienced some type of trauma. But many simply are struggling to keep up with all the information they contend with each day.
As a management professor at the DeGroote School of Business at McMaster University, I have my own share of deadlines to meet and pressures with which to contend. But through it all, I am constantly available to give my attention to my BlackBerry or computer should instant messaging, e-mail or video conferencing requests arrive. What I didn’t realize was the amount of mental energy it took to be so constantly vigilant. When it came time to go to bed at night, coming off this digital high was nearly impossible.
The chemical released in our bodies when we are so hypervigilant is called adrenaline. Adrenaline is great for situations when you must fight and defend yourself or escape a hostile situation, but to be in a constant state of adrenalization is not a good thing. In addition to causing you not to sleep, being constantly adrenalized can lead to anxiety disorders, high blood pressure and even heart disease. Information bombardment doesn’t only affect your social relationships; it can affect your physical and mental health as well.
Are you working to live or living to work? A balance between working and personal time is important in order to be healthy, but the number of people actually paying attention to this balance is shrinking every day. That doesn’t mean that constant information-seeking isn’t important in today’s knowledge era, but there needs to be a happy medium to be maximally productive.
In the US, most employees get two weeks of vacation a year, but most of us don’t even take that. In contrast, many Mediterranean countries take six weeks of vacation a year. In Greece, the entire month of August is a time for relaxing and leisure. No wonder why, when my family travels to Santorini, all the people there have smiles on their faces. The goal is to work smarter, not harder.
Vacation and leisure time have to be part of our priorities. Yes, sometimes we just have to turn the BlackBerry and the computer off. We clearly forget that all of these machines can be unplugged! That sounds pretty scary, eh? But in order to succeed in the knowledge era, we will need to find this balance in order to maximize overall productivity and quality of life. It’s time to unleash the digital chains that bits and bytes have over us and take back control of our lives.
My mother, Despina, spends almost every waking moment of her summer months tending to her lovely garden. She has a fantastic green thumb that is the envy of all of her neighbors. In fact, some budding horticulturists in the community have visited her simply to get advice on what flowers they should plant in their own gardens. My mother is always willing to part with her wisdom, which she has cultivated over several decades. In her case, the beauty of her knowledge is like the beauty of her garden: it is always more valuable when shared with others.
Here is a fact: knowledge is power. We use it to wield authority over people, groups, communities and even nations. We need it to succeed in our personal lives and in the workplace. The boundaries of geography and physical limitations no longer apply. Knowledge goes beyond these constraints and encompasses an ever-expanding body of information that is increasing at exponential rates. But as knowledge expands, time does not. This leaves us having to decide how best to manage the information with which we are bombarded and to which fragments to lend our precious attention spans.
I see us at a crossroads of sorts, or perhaps the edge of a cliff would be a better analogy. Each of us is confronted with endless bits of data second to second—the current temperature outside, the forecast for tomorrow, the exchange rate, the stock market level and whatever else we want to know. We thrive on it and have become dependent on it. But the costs have reached a point where we are suffering in the quagmire. Is it all necessary? Must we have it all at our fingertips right now? We obviously survived without it before, yet now we eagerly yearn for it and digest it bit by byte. All the while, our families, our friends and our health pay the consequences. This is the place I call null edge.
We can choose to embrace the knowledge era and gain control over the information bombardment that attacks us from every angle, or we can fall off the edge of the cliff and drown in an ocean of data. The digital chains of information bombardment will drag us over the edge unless we begin to prioritize and discern what is most important.
There is an old adage that states that when you are young, you have plenty of time but no money; when you are middle-aged you have money but little time; and only when you are elderly do you have both money and time. I don’t think this has to be true. I am often shocked when I hear colleagues complain that they have little time to do task A or B. It is the number-one complaint I hear in the workplace. Under my breath, I basically scoff at how poorly they are allocating their attention spans. One of the main objectives in my life is to maximize wealth and quality of life while minimizing energy expended. This is what we all want, isn’t it?
I have been to Santorini many times now, but my vacations are much different from before. I still check my e-mail periodically, but I don’t let information control my life. I take in the treasures that the island has to offer and think about what my Greek ancestors might have thought as they walked on the same beaches, swam in the same seas and watched the same sunsets. Could they ever have fathomed that our world would exist as it does today? Would they believe the magnitude of information each of us deals with on a daily basis? Despite all of this progress in technology, and despite bathing in bits and bytes, are we really better off?
No matter how you answer these questions, the fact remains that we all have to deal with information bombardment, and how this is done affects all of us at different levels. We now have no choice. We must do something about this yesterday. If not, we are in for dire consequences. On a personal level, our family lives and our health will be harmed. In groups and organizations, efficiency, productivity and profitability are at stake. Our nations and the global community continue to pay a high price. Information bombardment has already lead to catastrophic disasters like the failure to prevent 9/11 or to assist families quickly enough during Hurricane Katrina or the earthquake in Haiti. These are very real practical implications.
So what can we do? Plenty. But in order to understand how to tackle information bombardment, we first have to understand how we got to this point in our history. Our knowledge base hasn’t been steadily progressing through the generations. In fact, we have entered an exponential period of information explosion never before experienced. Unless we start to develop the tools with which to manage ourselves in the knowledge era, we indeed may be looking to an era of null edge. The choice is ours.
Further reading
Kaiser study: http://www.kff.org/entmedia/mh012010pkg.cfm
Insomnia: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1978319
Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder: http://www.nice.org.uk/nicemedia/pdf/CG72FullGuideline.pdf
Paper used in US: http://www.afandpa.org/
Brain capacity: http://www.moah.org/exhibits/archives/brains/technology.html
Computer storage: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/06/22/tech/main1740956.shtml
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Phoenicians, Gutenberg and the Mark I
It’s five o’clock in the morning and my alarm is going off. Sluggishly I sit up and reach over to my night table. Before I even glance over to see if the alarm has awoken my wife, I am already checking my BlackBerry to see what e-mails I received during my slumber. My wife’s good-morning kiss will have to wait. I cradle my BlackBerry gently and check the screen with wild anticipation. Wow, only forty messages in the last five hours! I skim through my inbox and isolate the critical action items. Awesome—all of my messages are good news. There is nothing critical, upsetting or time-sensitive that requires my attention for the next fifteen minutes. What a relief! I now feel calm and at ease, ready to start the new day.
Then I check out the last five hours’ worth of tweets, typically from my European and Asian followers. Then a quick read through my global news reader, weather updates and my personalized stock ticker, and I am off to the washroom. Within the hour I have completed a rigorous sprint on my incline treadmill and I have showered and dressed, all the while catching up-to-date local news.
Within the following thirty minutes, I have negotiated the streets and highway with my GPS and its dynamically updated traffic re-router. An optical character reader scans my license plate for the obligatory highway usage fee. In the background I listen to my satellite radio and make mental notes of the morning’s top economic and business news. The RFID parking tag on my windshield automatically raises the gate in front of my building and a local schematic points out the only remaining parking spot. The security card opens my office door and I finally sit in my ergonomic chair.
At my desk I will immerse myself in dozens of papers to grade as well as a handful of new research papers that I must edit before classes begin at eight-thirty sharp. Hardly four hours will have passed, yet I will already have digested a tremendous volume of information. This is simply a typical, average day for most knowledge workers. Who are we? Individuals who leverage their intellectual capital for economic benefit.
How did we get here? Was it always like this? No, it wasn’t. Information bombardment is a relatively new phenomenon. When Plato wrote about the island of Santorini and the legend of Atlantis, he wasn’t being constantly interrupted by a beeping pager or a ringing cell phone. The biggest thing he had to worry about was a student asking him a question or two about his philosophical musings. Our current world barely resembles the tranquility of the world that existed back in ancient times. The reason for this lies in the fundamental concept of knowledge codification.
In simple terms, knowledge codification is the process of externalizing our tacit expertise to give it permanent form. In other words, we take what we know and write it down to distribute it to another place or person more easily. Telling a story about an event as someone takes notes is a means of codification. Writing a news account of a recent happening for others to read is codification. Even sending an e-mail to a fellow employee about why you don’t like a company policy is codification. Knowledge codification is what allows us to learn about the world around us, whether it pertains to cultures, beliefs, values or facts. It is also the reason why we find ourselves bombarded with information today.
Let’s go back 200,000 years in time to the Paleolithic Era, when people lived in caves and communicated with each other through a series of grunts, groans and gestures. Cave people were primarily hunters and gatherers and lived a nomadic lifestyle, roaming from place to place. No alphabets, symbols or even common languages were present among various gatherings of people, and therefore codification of information was very limited. Instead of schools and books, information was communicated through songs, folklore, oral stories, behavioral patterns and traditions. The pressures of the day had more to do with finding enough food to survive and avoiding predators than it did with information processing.
“Hey Joe, got some meat?”
“No, ate it all.”
“Let’s go hunt for some more.”
“OK.”
Perhaps this is oversimplified, but the bottom line is that our ancient ancestors weren’t checking their e-mails, checking the morning news or even grabbing magazines. Their needs were simple and the amount of information they had to deal with was limited. They could easily distribute their knowledge to other members of their society through oral traditions and experience. I doubt anyone suffered from attention deficit disorder then.
Around 10,000 BC, societies began to shift from a nomadic lifestyle to a more regionalized way of living. With the introduction of the agricultural era, food supplies became more plentiful and the use of metal tools made travel more cumbersome. More importantly, this new means of existence provided an entirely new set of skills and knowledge. In addition to the skills of hunting and gathering, methods of crop cultivation and harvesting had to be passed on from generation to generation in order for progress and survival to occur. Apprenticeships and rites of passage began to emerge as means to distribute knowledge to younger members of the group. The need to become more efficient at codifying information was slowly becoming evident.
Codification Shift #1: The Alphabet
Around 3,500 BC—incidentally, the same time period during which the volcanic eruption formed the island of Santorini—a group of people in Mesopotamia began to develop the first writing system using letters and symbols. I imagine two guys were sitting around having to memorize some epic poem when suddenly one of them had a better idea.
“You know, Pete, I’m tired of trying to remember all these rhymes and stories. It would sure be nice if we could see them instead of having to memorize them.”
“Yeah, the pictures on the vases and walls just don’t help me remember what I am supposed to say.”
“Hey, how about we make a picture for each sound and then we won’t have to remember them?”
“Good idea! You make a sound and I’ll give it a symbol.”
This shaped the foundation of writing, which eventually led to the first set of hieroglyphics in Egypt circa 3,400 BC. The Phoenicians then developed the first widely used alphabet circa 2,000 BC. Letters and symbols were carved in stone and written in ink on different types of plant leaves. Instead of having to rely on memorization and inherent human error in recollection, written documentation was now available to be passed on from person to person. This change was a significant shift towards allowing knowledge codification to occur at a more accelerated rate. The time it took to write a passage of information compared to memorizing it was significantly less.
The Egyptian hieroglyphics led to the Phoenician writing system, which was the basis for the full writing scripts subsequently developed by the Greeks. Literacy began to flourish slowly throughout the region. Eventually, literacy spread through Europe and Asia, setting the stage for the formal codification of culture and history. The alphabet clearly was a major milestone in accelerating the dissemination of information more efficiently.
From the first development of a writing system in 3,500 BC, it took 1500 years for an established alphabet to be accepted and used. It then took another 900 years before the use of an alphabet was widespread among the many regions of the civilized world. Despite this, literacy rates within the ancient Greco-Roman empires were around fifteen percent at their height of power. Can you imagine progress being this slow today? I get frustrated now because the BlackBerry I bought a year ago no longer has the most up-to-date features available. This puts things in perspective, doesn’t it?
Gradually, the ability to read and write became incorporated into the European traditions of education. During the Early Middle Ages, Catholic monasteries were the main sources of literary education, which was primarily religious-based. These institutions evolved into religious universities, with secular universities beginning to appear around 1,500 AD. The concept of a teacher educating students one on one was radically changed as books and manuscripts became increasingly available. Now entire lecture halls could be filled with students, allowing one teacher to pass on his or her expertise in a more efficient and scalable manner.