The problem of information explosion predates the rise of the Internet in the consumer space; it just got worse with Internet's ubiquity and ease of access. A number of mechanisms have evolved in the Internet age to help improve information discovery as shown in the figure below. Note that the new mechanisms haven't replaced the older ones but simply expanded available modes of discovery.
Release of Netscape browser was the first sign of impending rise of the Internet. I remember getting excited about this cool new browser that was much better than Mosaic. Netscape was a great improvement over its predecessor but you pretty much had to type in the URL of a Web site until Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle (Yahoo) came along and started "organizing" the Web into a hierarchy of categories. Now you could traverse the categories, find a topic of interest and browse available web sites pre-classified to be in that category. The next step in the evolution was Google with its PageRank based technology that was very effective in adding relevance to search. This provided a much better mechanism to find information in which "reputable" Web sites related to search keywords were listed at the top.
When Web 2.0 arrived on the scene, we saw the emergence of folksonomies (tag clouds) and social bookmarking/tagging sites like Delicious, StumbleUpon, and Digg. These sites gently introduced Web readers to the notion of social curating when they started following bookmarks, posts, etc. created by people they trusted. Twitter perfected this art by providing the most efficient way of filtering information via social curating. Each Twitter user follows other users in the"circle of trust" that includes his friends, colleagues, and experts in the areas of interest. Resulting twitter feed then provides a much better way of finding interesting and useful content since it is either published or recommended by the people you trust.
Twitter is also very efficient in the way it gets information to you. Since the tweets are limited to 160 characters, it forces publishers to be succinct in their messages, a valuable gift for the recipients in the age of shortening attention spans. In general we are all getting used to and expecting instant gratification. Five day cricket test matches have for the most part been replaced by 20-20 games that last for about three hours; average movie lengths have been descending; younger generation talks in short bursts that almost sounds like an audio Twitter feed.
In a sense a Twitter feed is like the front page of a newspaper. The front page displays introductory portion of a number of news articles, most of the remaining article is on other pages. With Twitter, you get only the headlines and if you find that interesting, you click on a link that takes you to another place that shows you all the details.
The third reason for Twitter's popularity is that it is the most efficient way of advertising your personal brand. With Web 2.0 came a wave of new individuals that finally had the opportunity to create and maintain a personal brand. A number of now-famous individuals rode the blogging wave to make themselves into famous journalists, political analysts, critiques, reviewers, and advisers. The blogging revolution created a tournament (read more about the tournament behavior in Freakonomics) of information hawkers in which people compete to get rich in the information economy. Most competitors become part of the long tail and eventually stop playing. Some make it big and live on. From the information publishing viewpoint, Twitter offers a very efficient mechanism to advertise your offering. It is also very effective since information consumers increasingly rely on these headlines to get to the content they ultimately want to see.
Although Twitter founders must be quite happy with its success, the underlying trends that make it popular are a bit disturbing. It's rise is accompanied by addiction to passive information consumption, shortening attention spans, and increased multitasking. Addiction to Twitter is probably best explained by the theory of unpredictable rewards (the same rationale that explains email addiction): you get rewarded with really interesting piece of information at a random frequency, so you keep reading hoping to find that next reward.
Twitter joins the crowded ranks of other competing sources of information like email, television, etc. that are fragmenting attention spans. These "distractions" coupled with the increased pace and complexity of modern life are forcing multi-tasking behavior and frequent context switching. My sense is that these conditions are seriously affecting the ability to focus on and adequately examine important tasks. Some of the research in this area cited in this New York Times article concludes that multi-taskers are worse at filtering out irrelevant information and switch tasks. You can even test yourself on these abilities here.
Since going back to stone ages is not a particularly good solution, the only option is to adapt to the new reality and find ways to minimize its impact on productivity. To that end I leave you with the following techniques I personally employ that allows me to be a player an not just a spectator:
- Shop when you need something, not when there is a sale - This works with information as well. Instead of continuous looking for information, I choose the most effective way of information retrieval that helps me with the job at hand.
- Play only during recess - I reserve my random explorations (twitter feed browsing, searches on innovation, etc.) for selected time periods
- Publish less - I am not on the frequent Twitter plan. For the most part, I try to tweet when I think it is of broad relevance to reduce information pollution.
- Avoid reciprocal follower-ship - I am a bit choosy about who to follow leaving me with relatively less number of tweets to browse through
