Headroom for Headlines: News in the Now

It might be un-American to admit it, but I think the funniest thing about The Onion is the headlines. No offense to the rest of that great publication, but I rarely read past the blurb at the top. I’m not alone in this practice. When it comes to an information diet, our news is largely a headline-driven enterprise.

In 2006 Jakob Neilson found that browsers of online content read pages in an F-shape, conceding that they don’t read your website at all. They scan it. That means that most people who even visited this page have already stopped reading.

Images from Jakob Nielson’s eye tracking study.

The irony of using The Onion as an example is that an onion, when used as a metaphor, is a thing of many layers. It is only by peeling away those layers that one arrives at the elusive something obscured by them. I realize that many won’t consider The Onion a viable news source, but as an example, it works in the same way that The Daily Show does. Viewers of that show tend to be among the most-informed of publics, but it’s not because of the show. It’s analogous to the child growing up in a house full of books. A child who grows up with books in the house tends to be smarter, but it’s not because of the books. The books–and by analogy the show–are the third factor in the correlation. Parents who have books in their house tend to be smarter, and smarter parents have smarter children. Daily Show viewers tend to already be more informed before watching his show. I submit that the same can be said of readers of The Onion.

Back to the onion as metaphor: If we only observe the onion’s peel, we miss out on the something inside. So, if we’re only reading headlines, how informed are we? Status updates, Twitter streams, and Google search results only add to the pithy reportage we consume. Part of the problem is economic. Breaking headlines are much cheaper and easier to produce than in-depth follow-up stories (see Burns & Saunders, 2009), but part of it is us: We’ve chosen this form of media.

I’m admittedly not much of a news hound. In spite of my love of magazines, if you’ve read–or scanned–any of this website, you know I tend to read more books than anything else. I’m also not lamenting any sort of “death of print” sentiment or trying to rehash the arguments of Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows. I once called Twitter “all comments, no story,” and I’m just frustrated at finding out about things but never finding out more about them. If  “the internet is the largest group of people who care about reading and writing ever assembled in history,” as Clay Shirky once said, then what is it that we are reading?

The Onion and The Daily Show make preaching to the choir an understatement, but if The Long Tail taught us anything, wasn’t that it? Find your audience and serve them (Thank you for reading this far).

References:

Anderson, Chris. (2006). The Long Tail: Why the future of Business is Selling Less of More. New York: Hyperion.

Burns, Alex & Saunders, Barry. (2009). Journalists As Investigators and ‘Quality Media’ Reputation. Record of the Communications Policy & Research Forum 2009, 281-297.

Carr, Nicholas. (2010). The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains. New York: W.W. Norton & Co.

Nielson, Jakob. (2006, April 17). F-Shaped Pattern For Reading Web Content. Alertbox: Current Issues in Web Usability.

The Irony of the Archive

My parents have been living in their current house for over twenty years. My Moms’ part is a stockpile of paints, fabrics, and other craft supplies. Dad tends to save anything that he thinks might be useful later. Their combined efforts have amassed an archive that escapes any scheme of organization. I’ve overheard both mention recently that they had to go buy something that they knew they already had because they couldn’t find it among the clutter. Continue reading “The Irony of the Archive”

Building a Mystery: Taxonomies for Creativity

In a 2005 Daniel Robert Epstein interview, Pi director Darren Aronofsky likened writing to making a tapestry: “I’ll take different threads from different ideas and weave a carpet of cool ideas together.” In the same interview, he described the way those ideas hang together in his films, saying, “every story has its own film grammar so you have to sort of figure out what the story is about and then figure out what each scene is about and then that tells you where to put the camera.” Continue reading “Building a Mystery: Taxonomies for Creativity”

Too Much Information: Four Recent Books

In his 1995 book, Being Digital (Vintage), Nicholas Negroponte drew a sharp and important distinction between bits and atoms, bits being the smallest workable unit of the digital world, and atoms being their closest analog (no pun intended) in the physical world. In the meantime, this distinction has become more and more important as our world becomes increasingly digital or reliant on digital technologies.

The Long TailAs an over-simplified example, shelf space in a regular “bricks and mortar” bookstore is limited, but online it isn’t. In order to pay its rent and stay in business, a physical bookstore has to carry books that sell at a faster pace than an online store, which can afford to carry books that sell less often. The latter is called “the long tail,” and it’s how Amazon was able to stake its claim as “The World’s Largest Bookstore” and eventually to expand into every other product line one can put in a box or an inbox. When it comes to purely digital artifacts and products (e.g., digital file sharing, music downloads, ebooks, etc.), the power law on which the long tail is based isn’t truncated (as it is eventually in the Amazon example, and sooner in the traditional bookstore example).

The Long Tail (from Chris Anderson’s site)

Chris Anderson admittedly didn’t invent the idea (Jeff Bezos for one has been making millions with it for years), but no one else has covered it like he has in his book. The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More (Hyperion, 2006) is the concept shot from every angle, through every available lens. The idea is that blockbusters, hits, best sellers form “the short head” of the graph, and the niche items, cult phenomenon, lesser sellers form “the long tail.” Our culture is moving down the tail (i.e., it has become “niche-driven” as opposed to hit-driven) and off the shelf (online as opposed to in the store). Most retail stores only have room to carry items in the short head, while online “etailers” can carry items further down the tail. And when it comes to digital products, shelves are no longer an obstacle, in more ways than one.

Everything is MiscellaneousWhen products move from shelves to databases, the way they can be organized changes. Everything is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder (Times Books, 2007) is David Weinberger’s take on Web 2.0’s tags and folksonomies, set in contrast to objects in physical space (bits vs atoms). “Orders of order” he calls them. Items on shelves are limited by the rules of the physical world. Items in a database are not. The former can be filed in one category, on one shelf, in one place (the first order of order). The latter can be searched, browsed, alphabetized, tagged — all at the same time (the third order of order). These orders of order also apply to encyclopedic information — Wikipedia’s bits as opposed to Encyclopedia Britannica’s atoms — and the way it is created.

InfotopiaIn Infotopia: How Many Minds Produce Knowledge (Oxford, 2006), Cass R. Sunstein continues some of the work he did in Why Societies Need Dissent regarding deliberation, group polarization, and emergent knowledge. The most obvious and most successful example is Wikipedia. Whereas mindless mobs wait at the bottom of many collaborative slippery slopes (see a sharp antithesis to Wikipedia at Urban Dictionary), Wikipedia is frighteningly accurate. My friend and colleague Tim Mitchell proposed a great test of Wikipedia’s success: If you doubt the site’s aggregate knowledge, check its information against something you do know, as opposed to something you don’t. Sunstein’s book goes a long way to explaining the ins and outs of why collaborative filtering might provide the best method for knowing things.

Bit LiteracyMark Hurst’s Bit Literacy: Productivity in the Age of Information and E-mail Overload (Good Experience, 2007) approaches the infoglut from more of a self-help angle, proposing an ambitious plan for getting things done and getting things organized in the digital deluge. It’s not quite the panacea it purports to be, but useful ideas abound. Finding signal in the noise — especially in the noise of your own email, photos, files, to-do lists – is what bit literacy is all about.

As bandwidth increases, Negroponte’s observation from over a decade ago is finally showing its impact. The distinction between bits and atoms is an important one, and perhaps more important than we previously realized, whether we’re trying to find something or just find something out.

Reconnect the Dots: Toward a Decentralized Social Network

About a year ago, I had a discussion with my friend Ryan Lane about a “Trillian for social networks.” Having no idea how such a thing would work (and realizing that I probably wasn’t the only one thinking about it), I was trying bouncing aspects of it around with someone who might have an idea how it would work. Skip ahead to last summer, my friend Justin Kistner and I had a similar conversation. Well, in the meantime, Justin has gone several more steps toward making this a reality. Continue reading “Reconnect the Dots: Toward a Decentralized Social Network”

Peter Morville: Information in Formation

Peter MorvilleSince its original publication in 1998, Peter Morville and Lou Rosenfeld’s Information Architecture for the World Wide Web — a.k.a. “the polar bear book” — has been the standard text and handbook for information architects. The recently released third edition has been updated and expanded to include the user-driven aspects of Web 2.0 (It covers so much in fact that it could almost be called “the bi-polar bear book”). It also includes Morville’s latest kick, “ambient findability,” the latter of which is also the topic of his latest book of the same name.

I asked my friend, colleague, and fellow IA Ryan Lane to help me ask Morville a few questions about his books, the future of information architecture, and IA tools.

Roy Christopher and Ryan Lane: When your first information architecture book came out it was one of only a few books available on the topic. Today there is a sea of growing publications making it harder, even for the well-read IA, to keep up. What are your thoughts about this growth? What topics would you like to see that aren’t being written about yet?

Peter Morville: It has been really exciting to witness and participate in the growth of the IA field, but you’re absolutely right about the overwhelming volume of articles, books, reports, and podcasts. Despite being behind in my reading, I’m already looking forward to a couple of upcoming books: Everything is Miscellaneous by David Weinberger and Alignment Diagrams by Indi Young. I am surprised we haven’t seen a book written from the perspective of an “innie” about the evaluation, evolution, and continuous improvement of an enterprise information architecture. That’s a book I’d like to read.

RC and RL: There seems to be a constant struggle for an IA with new social and community technology that give the organization and taxonomy in the user’s hands. Some of these systems work really well, some do not. What is the best way for IAs to strike a balance between a well thought-out organization and user-generated structure?

PM: For every success story (e.g., Flickr, de.licio.us, Wikipedia) there are countless Web 2.0 failures. The information architecture is an important element, but unless the overall product or experience is exceptional (and well-publicized), the belief that if we build some of it, they will build the rest will prove unfounded. I’ve had the opportunity to work on a couple of Web 2.0 projects, and in both cases there was a natural, elegant bridge between tagging and taxonomy. So I don’t think that striking a balance between traditional and user-generated structures is the hard part.

RL: When are IAs going to be more involved with meta-architecture and web standards?

PM: I know some technical information architects such as Margaret Hanley (formerly of Argus Associates and the BBC) who feel very strongly that IAs should be more involved in XML and Web Standards. I agree. IAs can bring greater insight about users and information seeking behaviors to the development of more useful tools and standards. But that’s not an area that plays to my strengths, so I won’t be leading the charge.

RL: I use Visio a lot due to the fact that we work with Microsoft on a regular basis. I dislike Visio for more reasons than I could possibly list here (my preferences are OmniGraffle and InDesign). What tools are IAs using these days? What are the latest trends in IA software that you have seen? There seems to be a vacuum in the space of IA and taxonomy-specific tools.

PM: I was using Visio long before Microsoft acquired the company, and I’ll probably still be using it long after Google acquires Microsoft. Seriously, I’m a faithful Visio user and haven’t fooled around with the competition. Beyond diagramming, IAs rely on a variety of tools for prototyping, content management, analytics, thesaurus management, and more. We ran a survey last year that produced a nice list of the most popular software products. A couple of tools worth mentioning are Mind Canvas and Intuitect since both were developed by IAs for IAs.

RC: Can you briefly explain your concept of “ambient findability”? From folksonomies to wayfinding, it seems to extend IA into new, less-concrete areas.

PM: My latest book, Ambient Findability, describes an emerging world, at the crossroads of ubiquitous computing and the Internet, in which we can find anyone or anything from anywhere at anytime. My goals in writing it included stretching IA and going beyond IA. It’s a conceptual, big picture book, so (in my opinion) it’s less practical but more interesting than the polar bear book.

RC: Is there anything else that you would like to talk about? What’s next for you?

PM: I’m working on a large IA project with the American Psychological Association and traveling to speak at conferences. I was in Norway recently and am off to Australia next month. My goal is to keep myself busy, so I’m never tempted to write any more books.

Avoiding Affordances: Unusability Engineering

With all of the semi-recent focus on usability, I’ve noticed a growing countermovement that doesn’t get near as much attention: unusability. I’m talking here about deliberately designing something so that it’s not usable, not the much-maligned negligence of design that renders things unusable.

“Bum-proof” benchFor example, there are several bus bench designs that allow sitting while waiting for the arrival of mass transit, yet prevent the bench from being used as a bed. Most of these designs involve armrests or ridges in the seat to prevent one from lying prone across the bench, but my favorite is the backless, round-top bench: The seat is shaped like half of a cylinder and allows one to sit (albeit not a luxuriously comfortable place to park yourself). Without your feet on the ground though, you’re not likely to stay on top. Therefore, there’s no napping on this bench. In one of his books on L.A. (City of Quartz, Vintage, 1990), Mike Davis calls them “bum-proof benches.”

The manipulation of the perceived affordances of objects and surfaces is another great example. Donald Norman discusses a few of these in his book Turn Signals are the Facial Expressions of Automobiles (Addison-Wesley, 1992). Chairs and tables offer surfaces that are affordances for the support of weight. That is, a table affords support. If you have a glass counter on which you don’t want anything placed, it should be slanted. If it’s flat, it gives the perception of affording weight placed on top (and often ends up cracked).

The handrails around hotel balconies are typically rounded or beveled in such a way as to prevent the setting down of a beverage. This is to keep one from setting a beer bottle on the rail then drunkenly or excitedly knocking it off onto passers-by, cars, or just the ground below. This is not a design flaw. It is an engineered unusability.

Skate-blocked ledgeIn the past ten years or so architects and urban landscapers have made or retrofitted handrails and ledges to make them unusable for skateboarding. Large knobs welded onto metal handrails or blocks bolted to ledges keep skateboarders from using these surfaces as props or obstacles for their maneuvers. Again, these are not mistakes, but designed — if even often clumsily or not exactly aesthetically — for preventing a certain use.

There are many other examples, but it just struck me that the flipside of usability (in its deliberate form) doesn’t get much attention. Be on the lookout for things designed to prevent their use.

My Mother Was a Computer by N. Katherine Hayles and Shaping Things by Bruce Sterling

There’s been a lot of chatter, books written, and hand-waving about the merging of humans and machines ever since the computer reared its digital head. From artificial intelligence and humanoid robots to microchip implants and uploading consciousness, the melding of biology and technology has been prophesized far and wide.

Humans are indeed merging with machines, but don’t believe the hype: It’s not happening in the way those old science fiction books would have you think. Continue reading “My Mother Was a Computer by N. Katherine Hayles and Shaping Things by Bruce Sterling”

Brenda Laurel: Utopian Entrepreneur

Brenda LaurelWith over twenty-five years exploring human-computer interaction, Brenda Laurel is an unsung veteran of the field. Her doctoral dissertation was the first to propose a comprehensive architecture for computer-based interactive fantasy and fiction. Laurel was one of the founding members of the research staff at Interval Research Corporation in Palo Alto, California, where she coordinated research activities exploring gender and technology, and where she co-produced and directed the Placeholder Virtual Reality project. She was also one of the founders and VP of design of a spin-off company from Interval — Purple Moon — formed to market products based on this research. Her latest book, Utopian Entrepreneur (MIT Press, 2001), explores the struggles she dealt with at Purple Moon — attempting to perform socially conscious work in the context of business. Continue reading “Brenda Laurel: Utopian Entrepreneur”