Date: Mon, 02 Dec 1996 15:26:21 GMT Server: NCSA/1.4.2 Content-type: text/html Last-modified: Wed, 08 Nov 1995 21:18:32 GMT Content-length: 5062
Warning: this will make a lot more sense if you read Paul's comments first!
There are two types of people in the world. Let us call them Busy Executives and Just Plain Folks*.
Busy Executives keep hundreds of projects up in the air at once. Life for the Busy Executive is always hectic, so they need to maximize their productivity. There's no way they can do everything they have to do each day, so they need to do the most important things first. You know what would make a Busy Executive really happy? Some gizmo to read their email in the mornings before they get in, take care of the simple tasks, delete their junk mail, and then (best of all) rank the remaining messages in priority. Maybe tie it in to some sort of calendar micromanagement system whereby the computer tells the Busy Executive she has 3 minutes to send off a message wishing her secretary a happy birthday, then 12 minutes to send a message to the boss explaining why last month's performance report will be two days late, then 6 minutes of the phone with the lawyers, that sort of thing. Busy Executives could just come in and get right down to business.
Just Plain Folks are very busy too, but the WWW for them is a just diversion and occasionally a useful information source. It is an interesting but not a necessary or central part of their life. Just Plain Folks read rec.music.makers.guitar.acoustic and talk.politics.theory and sci.philosophy.meta. And they don't read them because they are are political theorists or guitar crafters or philosophers of science. If they missed that really great review about John Rawl's new book, well, that's OK because next week they'll probably be around for the discussion of piezo beeper pickups. Just Plain Folks don't want or need to optimize their quality time with the WWW not because they managed somehow to be more efficient that the Busy Executives, but because it just doesn't matter. Just Plain Folks don't always want messages that statistically correlate with the messages they liked in the past. They just want to kill a half hour. And they connect to http://neptune.corp.harris.com/rush.html precisely because they can't stand Rush Limbaugh... go figure.
I don't know what to make of these observations. But here's a couple of thoughts:
One more thing: I've heard estimates that the amount of information published every year is growing exponentially. Certainly this relationship holds for the WWW.
Now suppose we get devise a scheme for filtering all that information that runs in time that is, say, linear in amount of information in the world. Being linear in something that is growing exponentially won't work.
The counterargument, of course, is that humans make the information, and they have a limited capacity to make new stuff up, so the rate of growth of information can't exceed the rate of growth of people forever. The reason the growth rates are out of synch now is simply that the percentage of people on-line is growing (probably exponetially as well). The question is: Where are we in this process? Are we just about to hit the point when information stops growing so rapidly? I don't think so. It may well be the case that within 5 years half the US will be on the net, and we'll be able to handle it just fine. But what happens when half of China joins in?
My prediction: current fantasies about the growth of the WWW are simply unsustainable. Somehow my mind keeps slipping back to the days when the nuclear power industry told us that in the future (read as "now") electricity would be so cheap they wouldn't even bother to meter your usage.
This just in. Dan observes that the amount of comptutation is increasing expoentially as well, so all this is just a red herring. Fair enough.
*My apologies to Jean Lave.