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We know what you did last summer

Some time ago I wrote about the dangers of developments like child dossiers used by governments. One of the major risks is that people that will use this information use it without knowledge of the context when the information was stored. Information without context is hard to interpret leaves a lot of room for personal biases.

The Rathenau project I am doing deals with how the information anyone can find on the Internet will more and more become the context from which much of the official information in databases like Electronic Patient Files, Child Dossier, Civil Administration and others will be interpreted. This I showed also in the case on the social services. And many will recognize how they are using information found on the Internet as the context of the CV of a job applicant.

In relation to the social services we can debate whether this is a bad thing. After all the government also used special “kliklijnen” where people can complain anonymous about the black market activities of their neighbour on welfare. Not to say I approve of this method but it is legal.

But what about a health insurance company that starts to search the Internet for information on their patients. By law the insurance company has no access to the patients medical record. Are they allowed to factor in the information they can find on the Internet? I would say not but how can we prevent them from using this information. We can not prevent them from finding this information…

An example someone from CBP gave made me think. Say a woman just found out she is pregnant and has discussed morning sickness on a forum on the Internet. A week later she has a job interview where the HR manager has found this information. Even though as a society we have accepted that a potential pregnancy should not be discussed in job interviews we can not prevent people from using this information when they accidentally find it. And due to all kinds of mechanism I will discuss soon it is getting harder to stay anonymous on the Internet.

We can and should not control the information that is on the Internet. But on the one hand we will have to develop laws that govern what institutions are allowed to use and on the other hand we ourselves will have to deal with the fact that much personal information can be found.

Unless of course your name is Jan Jansen…

2009 07 04 Martijn Kriens privacy Tags: , , , Comments (0) Permalink

Peekeboo

090319beauGoogle is at the moment making pictures of all the citys in the Netherlands for their streetview service. Besides this being a usefull service (what does that area look like) it leads to some bizarre situations:

  • In some cases Google has by accident photographed famous dutch people. Even though the faces are blurred in most cases the people are still clearly recognisable. This may of course be a problem since it makes the place where someone lives visible for everyone.
  • In one case a crime is even solved. Some time ago a person was mugged in the street, just a the moment the Google streetview care was driving by taking pictures. The criminals got away. After some months the person looked at the streetview pictures of that location and to his surprise he could see himself and the boys that mugged him running away. He called the police, they called Google for the un-blurred pictures and got them. The criminals are apprehended.

Streetview now even has it’s own site where remarkable pictures can be found. Two people walking hand in hand on four separate pictures and others, famous people, people driving through red and others. The sheer amount of pictures that are being taking leads to all kinds of new questions how we should deal with it in relation to privacy.

How do you feel about this trend, do you see it as an invasion of your privacy?

2009 07 01 Martijn Kriens privacy Tags: , Comments (0) Permalink

High pressure

I suppose you all know the statement that during hard economic times that the economy has the flu (and as they say, when Germany sneezes we in Holland get pneumonia). Recently I wrote something about the flu monitor of Google.

Google also has recognised this resemblence between catching the flu and economic recession and has introduced an economic barometer. By paying attention to the nature of search words (new car is positive but occasion negative, vacation is good but golf vacation is better ..) they show the trend how people are feeling.

gbargbarI suspect that this will work pretty good. The terms people use are very much dependent on how they feel at that moment so this barometer will say something about how the general population is feeling (or better, how the feeling changes over time). Sometimes they can be very mistaken of course (many people search for Ferrari’s without being able to buy them anyhow. I sometimes search for beautiful destinations for vacations I know I will not make. A little bit of dreaming is nice ..). But in general this really might work.

Looks like the recession wont be ending any time soon, now that makes me feeling depressed …

2009 06 30 Martijn Kriens crowdsourcing Tags: Comments (0) Permalink

How was your vacation?

(to get in the mood for this posting you need to repeat the title of the article in a deeply sinister voice, you will understand why at the end of the posting ..)

At the moment I am working on a project for Rathenau institute relating to privacy and the information you can find on individuals on the Internet. I was talking to a friend who works for social security in a large city and he said that the Internet is a source they often use to get information about people.

One of the sites they are using is www.wieowie.nl. This is a service that queries information about a person from all kinds of sources: google, yahoo, schoolbank, hyves and others. But it also finds telephone numbers, the tags that relate to that person, photos and document that are associated with you.

It turns out that they regularly find information about people that points towards fraud. For example somebody who is asked by someone else how her vacation was in Mexico. At the social security service they for example can see that that person did not register for a vacation. Result can be that the person is invited to come to city hall to show her passport that may have a Mexican visa stamp in it….

This is an example of a new type of transparency that is becoming more and more pervasive in society. And it is not just the information you yourself put on the Internet. In the example above it can also be some of you friends discussed on hyves a story that you told them about your vacation.

In a way I think transparency is good. It can help us be more authentic. But it can also be a dangerous instrument when people trust too much on information that may be wrong or even distorted on purpose. As society we need to think about how to deal with this type of transparency.

Happy Holidays!

2009 06 29 Martijn Kriens Uncategorized Comments (0) Permalink

Would you do what Google does?

 

WWGD

WWGD

I just finished reading the Book “What would google do” from Jeff Jarvis. It is an interesting book but it puzzles me on two parts. In two words: Adds and Apples.

 

As for Adds, on the one hand he stresses the importance of the business model of Google by selling adds based on the data that you collect of a person. And of course, Google is wildly successful in selling adds. But on the other hand he explains that, due to the networked transparency that the Internet creates, advertising is less important. He even points out that not needing to advertise is a sign of success. To me that sounds like a contradiction. The more successful companies become in using the transparency of the Internet (created and improved in a large part by Google) the less profitable Google will become (and therefore not being able anymore to sustain their role in creating transparency). This catch 22 type of situation will no doubt have some equilibrium but is totally disregarded by Jeff Jarvis.

Another question about the business models on advertising that always puzzles me how far it can take us. If everybody would have advertising as their business model, who would pay for add? This “Addtention” economy can not encompass all, somewhere along the line people will have to pay for real products and services (and the companies selling these services are in the end the ones that are paying for the adds).

The second thing that puzzles me is Apples or, since they are unique, Apple. In many ways Apple is the opposite of Google. They create their products like an autist in splendid isolation. They are completely secretive about what they are doing and what products they are working on. They are closed in their hardware and most of their software and are ruthless towards people that breach that secrecy (or perhaps, HE is) is. And they too are wildly successful.  This discrepancy is mentioned by Jeff Jarvis but immediately is put aside because “Apple is a class in it’s own”. But of course, Google is a class of it’s own too. The reasons why companies like Google, Apple and Microsoft are successful can never just be copied because their current success feeds on the fact that they became an outlier (meaning a small difference in the beginning created the opportunity to keep enlarging that advantage).

The good thing about the book are the hypothetical cases he discusses in the end. What if banks would be operated in a Google manner, or insurance companies, or a hospital. Lots of foods for thought there (talking about food: also what if a restaurant would operate like Google).

2009 05 16 Martijn Kriens business models Tags: , , Comments (0) Permalink

Recovery revisited

Recovery.gov is the website that Obama uses to deliver on his promise to let us monitor “to the last dime” of the government money that is being spent in the simulus package. However, reporting on progress and spending is a difficult thing if you have to fall back on formal reporting mechanisms from the whole country to the lowest bureaucratic levels. At this moment they are saying that the first reports will be delivered somewhere in Oktober (november, december …).

In comes a commercial company, Onvia, that made a website that tracks the planning and spending of the stimulus package on the website recovery.org. This website relies on a crawler mechanism that checks thousands of websites on information about spending in relation to the stimulus package and make this information available to the public. For companies to lead them to intesting projects to pitch and for citizens to check what kind of projects are being setup in your local neighbourhood and make it possible to complain about silly projects to local politicians. Below is an interview with the CEO of Onvia:

I think this is an interesting development where formal reporting procedures are turn out to be much slower than can be achieved with public scanning of websites and some intelligence of crowds. Question of course is to check the validity of the information but, as they say in open source: with enough eyeballs all bugs are shallow. Enough citizens using a website like this to check on progress and projects means a pretty good check on the validity of information.

2009 05 09 Martijn Kriens Uncategorized Comments (2) Permalink

Scalia likes …

Some time ago I had a discussion at the Rathenau institute with Geert Munnich about a new project they are setting up (the picture on the side I took of Geert and Mirjam Schuijff to show them that it is not only information they publish themselves that may harm their privacy but also pictures someone else might take that includes date and GPS data). During this meeting we talked about the idea that in a way the Internet is often used for the same purpose as the formal databases are used to find information about people. There is so much valuable information to find on people if you take some effort to find it. It is probably even richer than the data in many formal databases like those form the civil service.

In relation to this I came across this article. It deals with Judge Scalia of the supreme court in the USA. He has always played privacy issues down in relation to information stored on the Internet. However, recently a professor of law in the USA asked a group of his students to compile a dossier on judge Scalia based on information they could find on the Internet. This turned into a 15 page dossier with much information that is fairly personal like the food he likes, the movies he goes to, private e-mail addresses and more. The response of Scalia was as follows:

It is not a rare phenomenon that what is legal may also be quite irresponsible. That appears in the First Amendment context all the time. What can be said often should not be said. Prof. Reidenberg’s exercise is an example of perfectly legal, abominably poor judgment. Since he was not teaching a course in judgment, I presume he felt no responsibility to display any.

I think this reaction completely disregards the duty we have as a society to protect people from too much information floating around. We know that not everybody will be responsible with information they find.

Of course, there is nothing of interest to find about me …

2009 05 07 Martijn Kriens privacy Tags: , , Comments (0) Permalink

“Floogle”

Because so much of our activities in our daily lives have some form of connection to the Internet some amazing effects happen. Google recently launched a service where they track flu related queries that people are using in their searches. Analysing their data back to 2003 and comparing it to the CDC network they found that they can pinpoint the start of a flu epidemic two weeks earlier than the CDC. They can even follow the spread of the flu geographically (at least, in the USA).

This is I think an amazing example of how we can use this kind of implicit “wisdom of crowds” type of ideas. considering the risk of the swine flu epidemic in Mexico this might come in handy… The flow of the epidemic can be followed in Google maps.

More information you can find in the Nature article and of course on the Google website.

2009 04 26 Martijn Kriens Uncategorized Comments (0) Permalink

ReMarketable

Some time ago I started a new company with two friends, Jan Arends and Eddy Reimerink. Our focus is a partnership between technology providers that are focused on a niche market but have technology that can be used in other markets with solution vendors strong in these other markets. The website is www.remarketable.nl and you can read more in the following slides:

Remarketable V2 R1x

2009 04 26 Martijn Kriens ReMarketable Tags: Comments (0) Permalink

Banker 2.0

Recently Hans Wortmann and me have given a presentation in Amsterdam for the Holland Financial Centre (HFC). Subject of this presentation was (of course) the development of SaaS in relation to the financial Sector. ICT is very much undervalued in the financial sector. Even though financial institutions spend considerably amount of money on IT it seldom is used strategically in practice. Robin Fransman, deputy director of HFC, showed this clearly by pointing out that the wordt ICT is only mentioned once in the working plan for the HFC for 2008/2009. This funny enough to everyone’s surprise!

In the presentation (that you can find here) we showed many examples how ICT in general and SaaS in particular will change the banking sector significantly in the coming years. For example, Google already has a banking licence in the Netherlands…

The presentation changed into a lively and interesting discussion with the the audiance. The general feeling was that financial institutions really should be more aware of the strategic possibilities (and competitive dangers) of ICT. At the moment we are working an a way, together with HFC, to keep that discussion going.

You can find the presentation here.

Eff V1 R0

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2009 04 08 Martijn Kriens Uncategorized Comments (0) Permalink

Service Innovation and SaaS

Yesterday I gave a presentation for the Services Innovation unit at SenterNovem and the Economic Affairs department. Focus was on how SaaS is one of the important enabling foundations of service innovations. Service innovation is possible through advancements in ICT but ICT is not a transparent factor that makes everything possible. Some functionalities are easy to achieve whereas some are hard or impossible due to the quirky nature of technology.

However, often to little attention is given to the relation between business goals and ICT possibilities. Our statement is that both need explicit attention.

Ez Sn Kenniscommunity

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The presentation is ended with a call to start working on a national testbed infrastructure for the development of SaaS services. Espcially a country like the Netherlands can be strong in delivering services by “mashing up” all kinds of basic services due to our strengths in trade. In the development of the inrastructure needed to create an agile business community capable of creating and delivering services worldwide there certainly is a role for the government.

2009 04 08 Martijn Kriens Uncategorized Comments (0) Permalink

Aging 0.5

The aging society is I think one of the big issues that as society we will have to deal with in the future. We do know that there will simply be not enough hands to help the aging people in a way that is personnel. Technology can help a lot but has the risk of creating a too mechanical care. A special lift can help you out of bed but will not talk to you.

That is why I like projects where technology helps us by connecting people and give care in a way that is friendly and personnel. Like this project or this. In the second project my favourite moment was when the elderly lady is told that there is a camera in the Aibo and here reaction is: oh nice, it can see me?

However, today I read that there are even bigger problems in an aging world. In Japan people that turn 100 receive a special silver cup. Only there are so many people turning a 100 now that they had to reduce the size of the cup in order to save money! In 1963, the first year they started this program, only a 153 people turned 100. This year a mind boggling 19,769 turned 100!!!

I think this shows in a symbolical way the challenges we will face the future decades. You can read more about it here.

2009 03 05 Martijn Kriens Uncategorized
research Tags: Comments (0) Permalink

Privacy 0.2

Yesterday I heard an interesting item on the television. In Weesp there had been some threats made towards schools over the phone. In the end it turned out to be little children that made them.

Interesting part is how the police found out who they were. The boys made the call to the schools on a public payphone, thinking the04_07_63-cctv-security-camera_weby would not be traceable that way. Of course the police could easily find out which payphone was used but by the time they were there the boys were long gone. However, the police was able to acquire several images of video camera’s close by that had the boys on tape while they were making their calls. By showing these video images on national television the parents recognised them and immediately took them to the police station (brave action!).

This case does show, even though the outcome is rather positive in this case, that it is more and more possible to follow people and in the end, invade privacy of civilians. Technology allows us to follow anyone we want in many places.

Remember, you are being watched!

2009 02 12 Martijn Kriens Uncategorized Comments (0) Permalink

Power to the People

info-graphicGoogle is very much working on ways to stimulate conservation of energy. One of the issues they mention on their blog is that by giving feedback to people it is possible to save lots of energy in homes and offices. Some time ago I was involved in a research study where we looked at research worldwide on this subject. One of the most remarkable ones was a study done in Stavanger, Norway. There it turned out that just by changing the period after which people settle their energy bill (you get a bill every month normally but only once a year the energy company checks if the bill is the same as the real (average) use during the year). They changed the period from one year to two months (meaning the amount used was checked bi-monthly and the bill adapted accordingly). The energy use of households after this went down 8%. Because of the bi-monthly check people where immediately reminded that energy costs a lot during winter. With some extra data the savings grew to 12 to 16%.

This feedback on use can be more fine-grained. At home I am using a plug from plugwise that measures the use of energy of that energy outlet and allows me to test how much I would save by using the built in “stand-by killer” during the night (it is amazing how much energy some appliances use while on standby, my printer uses a whopping 40 watts on standby, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week). An interesting example how ICT can help to lower our energy footprint. Some time ago I also made a blog on a presentation I gave last year.

In Amsterdam we are setting up a project with more than 700 homes where we will be testing what kind of feedback works best (Amsterdam Smart City). Another project I am starting with is the Connected Urban Development where we make it possible to take a look on the energy use in the city and be able to zoom into certain areas, maybe even to an individual level.

The document with the research (like the Stavanger case) you can find here.

It’s the kind of projects that give me a lot of energy!

2009 02 11 Martijn Kriens Energy Tags: , , , Comments (0) Permalink

Longing for latitude

One of the interesting features of technologies is how it can bring people close together, in real life as well as in perception. Google has an interesting new feature called Google Latitude. Through this service you can show your location to your friends and of course see the location that your friends are sharing with you. Interesting feature is that the application has a fine grained way of setting your privacy in relation to the various friends that you have. This I think is a general direction you see in web 2.0 that more and more people are becoming concerned about privacy and about who really are your friends you are willing to share all. In the past I used an application called IYOUIT that was also capable of showing this like this. To me it was surprising how much feeling is involved in knowing precisely where your friends are.

location of friends

2009 02 05 Martijn Kriens Social Software
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Everyware

One of the most interesting developments I see at the moment is the move to ubiquitous ICT. ICT in the form of small unobtrusive sensors, smart ICT that takes the context of the user into account (based on all those sensors) and feedback mechanisms to users that do not use explicit displays do this much more on an “experience” level, e.g. by changing the colour of light. I recently read a book called Everyware (as in Hardware and Software) that says some interesting things on this. Sort of like using computers without really using a computer….

A very nice example of this is the “unpronounceable rabbit“. It connects to the Internet, is able to sniff RFID tags and communicate by talking, changing colours, communicates with his ears and all kinds of other things. And the rabbits can talk to eachother so you can send messages to a friend by just twisting his ears.

2008 11 26 Martijn Kriens everyware Tags: , , Comments (1) Permalink

Innovation

At the moment I am very much involved in Living Labs. Living Labs are an important development in research, design and development. At the core of the living labs idea is that the gap between design and reality is growing. More and more products and services have social networking aspects or location aware functionality. These aspects are very hard to simulate in a normal laboratory like Home lab at  Philips.

Amsterdam Living Lab is the initiative that we are starting in, surprise, Amsterdam. Here we are changing Amsterdam in a large scale laboratory, together with Waag Society, University  of Amsterdam and Telematica Instituut. Together we try to create new design, develop and test processes based on real life user experience. For this measurement tools and sensor to measure reality will be developed and new design processes that take this real life data into account.

More locations in the Netherlands are developing such an approach. Living Lab Leiden is involved in development of wireless services, Rotterdam Climate Initiative is developing new approaches to saving energy. Approaches that take the real life behaviour of people into account. For the Innovatieplatform I am working a plan to strengthen this ecosystem of initiatives and promote the capabilities national and international.

Next week the Innovatieplatform is organising a big day on innovation in the Netherlands. I am organising a track on Living Labs there too. Several Living Labs are  present and  some demo’s are given. So if you are interested, drop me a line. Meet you on third of December in Rotterdam.

2008 11 26 Martijn Kriens Living Lab Tags: , Comments (0) Permalink

Google bank

Banks are of course very much the focus of the news these days. One of the interesting news items a journalist found out is that Google already has a banking license in the Netherlands. Bank are potentially one of the sectors that will change a lot because of business possibilities that a technology like SaaS will enable. Competition will come from completely new sectors because they are better at reaching the market or using the “intelligence of crowds”.

While searching a little further I found this blog post from Jeff Jarvis where he is asking for examples of bank services that Google would be very good at. Examples are peer to peer lending, more transparency around transactions in stocks, open source platforms to increase functionality (E-invoices anyone?).

In a way Google checkout and it’s competitor PayPal are already on the move. In my view banks really have to start thinking on how to really innovate their processes through which they create value for their customers.

2008 11 24 Martijn Kriens businessmodel Tags: , Comments (1) Permalink

Flabbergasted

This is very interesting picture that shows the difference between the opportunities for saving energy between Europe and the USA. I do not think there are many households in the Netherlands that do not use a programmeable thermostat, often even integrated with a outside temperature sensor. This is something we have to keep in mind when comparing research on energy saving between the USA and Europe.

2008 11 04 Martijn Kriens Energy Tags: , Comments (0) Permalink

Oops, sorry, forgot the attachment …

who does not know the feeling of feeling utterly silly when sending an e-mail in which you say that you are enclosing an attachment after which you forget to include the attachment. I know it happens to me and most people around me. But Google is paying attention!

They now have a new function where Google scans the text of you e-mail and when it thinks you intended to include an attachment it gives you a reminder. I think this is a nice example of paying attention to your users and deliver services that are based on looking what people are really doing and what really goes wrong while doing it.

I understand from the google groups that discusses this that it does not really work very well at the moment (it misses a lot of cues when there should be an attachment) but let’s hope they will get it right. At least they are trying …

2008 10 09 Martijn Kriens Uncategorized Comments (0) Permalink

User interface 2.0?

Some time ago I bought an iPhone and I must say I love the user interface. It all feels very slick, every function does what you think it should do and looks very nice.

However, I recently downloaded an iPhone app from the NOS that shows you teletekst directly on you iPhone. very convenient.

However, I was wondering myself that it is quite a remarkable that this application for the iPhone is that popular. It is a user interface designed for TV’s with minimal interaction and minimum use of graphics. Of course the original idea was that through this simple view and interface it was easy to use and easy on the hardware. All reasons that are completely not valid on the iPhone platform.

I wonder where the popularity comes from. Is it because people are used for so long to this interface or are minimal interfaces more powerful than we think anyhow? Amazing..

2008 09 19 Martijn Kriens user interface Tags: Comments (3) Permalink

Transparancy in politics

I recently came across this website that is dedicated to fact checking on political statements in the USA. If you listen to the candidates for US president it is often very hard to know if they are talking the truth, bending the truth in their direction or lying outright. Interesting to see that this website (and there are several other ones like this one) are increasing the transparancy a lot. It is shocking to see how much “distorted truths” are being told by these politicians.

The power of sites like these is that it will be getting harder and harder to stretch the truth once very white lie is monitored..

2008 09 07 Martijn Kriens Politics Tags: , Comments (0) Permalink

MobileHCI

Last days I was present at the MobileHCI conference. I was involved in this conference as sponsor chair. This conference deals with how to design and use mobile devices and experiences. There have been two issues that I found remarkable.

The first is the fact that two research projects dealing with the design of user interfaces showed that people preferred to use the slower interface. In one example they had developed an interface with special icons to use in the address book of the phone, targeted at illiterate people. Research showed that although people were faster through the visual interface they still preferred the alphanumerical one. Maybe they just did not want to be branded illiterate?

The second project dealt with research on the amount of air pollution children are exposed to by their route to school. This Lancaster project gave GPS equipped phones to 12 year old children and had them make pictures and blog their route to school, through all seasons. These routes were compared to the known air pollution throughout the city. Also the children got asked questions on how they felt and on their health. Through this research they could show the children that they would have less air pollution by taking another route. But reality is much more complex than we think. Many of those routes were banned by their parents because they are thought not be safe (e.g. a route through the park).

Both projects show that reality is much more complex than we think when designing products and services. This complexity is I think growing with the digitization of our society.

This conference was also the formal start of the Amsterdam Living Lab, a large research program I am involved in where the focus is in helping designers design products that people really want, not the ones designers think they want. I will publish more on this soon.

A last example how reality can be unexpected also came from the Lancaster project. The children all came from a very poor neighborhood. It turned out that some of them could not recharge their phone during the evening because their parents had pre-paid electricity …

And a final fact during the conference in another presentation: more than 60% of the mobile searches are for adult content: why does it not surprise me anymore …

2008 09 06 Martijn Kriens Living Lab Tags: , , Comments (0) Permalink

Durability 2.0

iFlickrWe all know we have to be very careful with energy due to the warming up of our planet, dependency on energy from areas in the world you do not want to be dependant on and other reasons. But we also know that it is very hard to find the incentives to stimulate people to save energy here and now. Problem is that there is too much of a time lag between the action to save energy and the advantages acquired.

Recently I held a key note presentation at the conference “Greening the enterprise 2.0“, focused on how to save energy in office environments. Especially in offices it is hard to stimulate people to save energy because they do not have to pay the energy bill themselves. Automatic systems are usually circumvented (people open windows in completely controlled buildings because the intelligent control mechanism for temperature is less intelligent than the maker thought) and therefore seldom delivers the result that we think of beforehand.

And people are lazy. The picture on this post is from my own re-chargers in my office. I once placed a switch there to switch of the electricity. But after two cases of dead batteries that I needed at that moment I always have it switched on.

Focus of my presentation was how to use social networking aspects to stimulate people to save energy. By sharing best practices but also by more direct feedback on individual actions and results (and some peer pressure maybe …).

Here are the sheets.

2008 08 28 Martijn Kriens Energy Tags: , Comments (0) Permalink

Concentration

While scanning through some of the articles I missed during the holiday season (you really do not need a computer on a terras in Barcelona eating Tapas and drinking wine) I came across this Article from Nicholas Carr (Is Google making us stupid). Central them of the article is that due to jumpy way we read on the Internet (following another link after some paragraphs of reading) our way of thinking may be changing. More and more it is becoming difficult for a lot of people to concentrate on long texts, let alone long books like war and peace.

I do think this is a risk we are facing at the moment. In workplace research there is something that is called Attention Deficit Disorder. What it means is that people are so accustomed to browsing and wandering of a subject, checking mail all the time, reacting to chat and other disruptions that in the end they are not capable anymore of creating things that need concentration for a longer time. They are reacting instead of acting. I myself can sometimes feel this way: you have to force yourself to stay away from email and chat for several hours do finish something that you really have to think about.

A lot of our philosophical heritage is coming from people that were accustomed to do a lot of thinking without interruption. Of course, Plato and Socrates had little choice without broadband Internet available to them… What does this fragmented way of collecting information and maybe the resulting fragmented way of thinking lead us to in the future?

There definitely are positive aspects too. Now it is much easier to connect different information parts because they are all easy to find, or somebody else already connected them for you.

At the least this new way of reading and its consequences for our way of thinking is something we need to take into careful consideration when designing our new tools for the workplace.

Interesting read and food for thought. Do not forget to read the whole lengthy(?) article …

2008 08 20 Martijn Kriens Workspace Comments (0) Permalink