Infotention

Automating repetitive processes, including those you use to seek, filter, tag, store, and retrieve information, can be a useful infotention practice. I've Scooped IFTTT before. This blog post is by social media management service Buffer, so the examples are Buffer-centric, but any of these automation tools can be applied to a variety of platforms, services, and practices.

While Google Glass is what most of the world hears about wearable info-devices these days, Steve Mann and Thad Starner were experimenting with (much bulkier!) wearable devices at the Media Lab more than a decade ago. I interviewed Tharner back then. He had a head-mounted display and he also communicated wirelessly with his networks through a one-handed keyboard ("twiddler"), sometimes asking questions about conversations he was engaged in face to face. In this blog post, Kevin Kelly picks out a key passage from an interview with Starner in a book by Michael Chorost. While Cliff Nass' work pretty clearly showed that most (not all!) media multitaskers were degrading rather than enhancing their performance on their tasks, Nass, in conversation with me, noted that he had NOT studies instances in which the multitaskers were working with multiple relevant information streams. Starner calls this multiplexing. We need more research about whether everybody can learn to do this and  whether it enhances or degrades performance.

When I am researching or scanning a topic, I like to pull RSS feeds from Google alerts and other alert services -- I like Talkwalker. Knowing how to create and tune what Robin Good calls "news radars" is an essential infotention skill for people like me who track a lot of subjects and from time to time drill down on a subject more intensively.

I must use this a hundred times a day. It's the single most useful utility I have and I don't understand why it isn't part of the Mac OS. You can keep track of the last 200 items you've copied or cut to your clipboard and reuse them easily -- including multimedia. You can set up a hotkey combo to paste the top item in the stack, then delete it -- immensely useful for web work, blogging.

I learned about "email apnea" -- holding your breath at times when you are doing your email or concentrating on composing something online -- from Linda Stone. And when I looked into the attention-training side of infotention, the intersection of contemplative meditations on the breath and contemporary neuroscience studies of the connection between breath and intention/attention stood out. Online attention is too disembodied. I moved to a standing desk a year ago and I love it. I have an outdoor standing desk and do my work standing, barefoot on the lawn, as often as possible. The studies noted in this article offer evidence that physical activity can improve cognitive function. So  getting up and moving around, noticing when you are holding your breath, changing your position are essential parts of mindful infotention -- knowing where your body is while your mind is in abstraction-land is part of metacognitive awareness essential to mindful use of digital media.

Knowing how to find the answers you need swiftly is a key infotention skill (one that will become even more important when Google Glass and other heads-up displays with voice activation will make it possible to pose queries when you are away from your computer or even without taking out your smartphone). Knowing how to determine whether the answers you get are legit is a different but related info-skill: crap detection.

This is about infotention -- "combination of the right kind of practice and the right kind of tools." I share thesis whisperer's enthusiasm for Scrivener for long projects or even short writing projects that have many moving parts.

I'm a newcomer to Evernote, but finding it to be a great augmentation of my short-term memory. Together with CopyPaste Pro, it's one information-handling utility that I use dozens if not hundreds of times a day. I have not yet tried this tool for mindmapping my Evernote notebooks, but I agree that the two-level folders is a limitation.

Researchers at PARC, the place that brought us the personal computer as we know it, conduct research that further complicates the picture of multitasking. It isn't so simple as "multitasking is bad, focus is good," or "using mobile communication devices distances people who are face to face." Channel blending brings together these issues.

IFTTT to Evernote can be a powerful team infotention tool (Diigo groups is good for circumstances in which you want to attach comment threads to bookmarked material, add sticky notes, etc.)

Filtering is essential to the info-handling side of infotention, and JP Rangaswami is one of the few people I look to for deep and broad thinking about infotention issues (Harold Jarche and Robin Good are others who immediately come to mind). Consider adding his blog to your RSS aggregator: confused of calcutta: a blog about information

Bryan Alexander takes off from Jane Hart's personal knowledge management routine to describe his own method of handling information overload, which he calls "information wrangling." He works through channels and sources daily, reflects, and shares. Alexander details each of these processes in his blog.

A cornerstone of infotention is that attention and cognitive skills can be improved through training. Most research into this claim is recent, and as with all scientific research, there is some controversy. This article provides a good mary sof recent research that appears to support the efficacy of "brain training."

IFTTT ("If this, then that) is definitely a power tool on the info-tool side of infotention. You create "triggers" for events (such as, but not limited too, keyword searches and RSS feeds) and then make something happen -- a tweet, an email, a bookmark, a Facebook status update. Automatically tweet Instagram pix you or others take, or send them to Flickr. These combinations of triggers and actions are socially shared as "recipes" -- roll your own and/or shop for existing recipes. This particular recipe for keeping track of selected congressional votes is just one example -- this blog has new ones often (as do other users).

Most of the talk about attention and media has been about the deleterious effects of distraction; most certainly, there are many instances in which this is the case (in particular, the horror of texting while driving). Much of this discussion and general discourse has looked at the wandering mind as a distraction from focal awareness, a perhaps pleasurable but inevitably counter-productive foible. The author of this literature review in the Scientific American blog takes exception. It depends on context. Indeed, mind-wandering may be essential.

I have one very small but very important difference with the thesis of this article. Where the author says "we can't expect them to develop their attention by reading 140-character tweets..." I would insert the word "just," as in "we can't expect them to develop their attention just by reading 140-character tweets..." Attention and attentional skills are vulnerable and trainable along a spectrum of infotentional situations. And 18 minute videos about big ideas are a legitimate form of cultural expression, with a legitimate place on that spectrum. Where I do agree with the author is with his main prescription -- yes, I require my students to blog and tweet. I also expect them to spend hours each week reading longer and often considerably complex texts.