The guys over at Union Square Ventures posted an intriguing insight coming out of their recent USV Sessions event. During the session Umair Haque quoted Herbert Simon, a cognitive psychologist who made significant contributions to the fields of artificial intelligence, economics, and philosophy. In 1971, Simon made the following observation:
"What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it." (Computers, Communications and the Public Interest, pages 40-41, Martin Greenberger, ed., The Johns Hopkins Press, 1971.)
The proliferation of information on the web means there is more content published, by more organisations and individuals, and made more easily accessible and interactive than ever before. But as Fred Wilson points out in his post, our capacity to consume and contribute information hasn't increased as the world has gone digital. Indeed, it has also been exacerbated by the wealth of both good and poor quality information we have to sift through to find our "information nuggets".
Consequently, we either focus our attention around a few trusted sources and communities or spread it more thinly across a larger universe. And in order to absorb new content and services as our attention capacity is reached, we have to ditch the least valued of our existing "attention grabbers".
So what does all this mean?
Search services such as Google and content tagging services a la delicious allow us to more simply and quickly locate content online. And RSS makes it easier to be kept abreast of changes to content on our favourite sites. But we still end up having to process lots of uninteresting content in order to find those snippets of information of real interest.
As John Battelle comments his book The Search, search technology is at best 5% solved. So such technology has a future part to play in assisting with the surfacing, filtering and notifying of relevant content based upon our past clickstream, rather like Amazon makes recommendations based on our past purchases and similar purchases by other customers.
Should this become a reality, we will be able to utilise our attention more efficiently, allowing us to focus only on consuming content we want to consume. But ultimately, as our attention capacity is limited, there's only so much relevant content we can digest resulting in an ever increasing attention deficit.
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