Grandmas are the fastest growing sector on Facebook in 2010. Can you imagine Grandma liking your outfit from last nights’ party, commenting on your hairstyle or asking you who are you kissing with?

Once 74 and up are the fastest growing sector on Facebook, that’s a good reason to applaud Zuckerberg, named person of the year.   The humane value of such digital inclusion of elderly boomers exceeds by far the social attributes of belonging to a social network.

Age related digital divide is one of the things that make older people, and even late boomers, feel inadequate. What seems to many elementary, creates a paralyzing situation for elders at the most fundamental web based usage situations.  The joy of a grandmother that can press the Like button,  be updated on her grandchildren’s status through Facebook, find her way through Google, chat on Skype and send emails, is not to be taken for granted.

Elders are intimidated by technologies. Computers (other than basic functionalities) and the notions of the social web are very remote from their natural world. The digital inclusion of being able to manage on their own and communicate through Facebook and the connectivity it empowers them, mastering what to digital natives is intuitive, gives older people a sense of belonging and inclusion in the digital society and an ageless lifestyle.

We live in a society where from now on the number of elders will exceed the number of youngsters. Inclusion of past generations in spaces previously defined as youngsters’ spheres is indicative of the extent in which web fabric is being woven into our life. These Facebook penetration numbers manifest the mainstream place and the connectivity changing experience of Facebook.

Adapting experiences for people in their natural settings is a must if you want to reach masses through usability comfort and culture they feel comfortable with. Elders were associated with TV. Youngsters with computers.

Now that media borders are blurring and inclusion percentage in the digital society is on the rise – the next digital entertainment frontier is back to the TV screen. Or to be more exact – the IPTV experience.

TVs don’t have to become obsolete. 

Obsolete TV support group

Adaptations to IPTV can be older friendly and enhance digital inclusion.

Here again, youngsters are natural to surfing complex EPGs  or watching the shows of their choice on their computers. Elders, on the other hand, are still coach potatoes, used to passive remotes.

Translating the internet browsing experience through simplified interfaces and TV like navigation is another door, full of opportunities to devise new ways of inviting elders to join in. Kylo is a new web browser for TV that transfers the interactive experience to the TV screen itself, with a virtual on TV screen keyboard and a simplified TV oriented  browser. That and Google TV  will hopefully facilitate  inclusion of  millions of elders in a big-screen living-room web experience, and thus merge the comfort of their familiar coach based TV world with the interactive browsing of digital life.

A bunch of guys at Google had a wonderful idea. Let’s create a series of videos that will help our parents to use the web. They  launched a site that empowers people to teach their grown up parents how to use the web. It is a great step in helping older people to overcome their technophobia.

Age related digital divide is one of the things that makes older people, and even late boomers, feel inadequate. What seems to many elementary, creates a paralyzing situation for elders at the most fundamental web based usage situations. Managing on their own, through a simplified adapted process of guidance that does not embarrass them in front of their children and grandchildren, not only answers their need to know, but provides a handle  to confront the issue on their own, at their pace, without being pressured by their slow and hesitant learning curve. Knowing that those guides are there, always at reach and they can revisit if they forget, makes seniors confident. Mastering things that to digital natives is intuitive, gives older people a sense of belonging and a feeling of being included in the digital society.

The joy of a grandmother that can press the Like button,  be updated on her grandchildren’s status through Facebook, find her way through Google, chat on Skype and send emails, is not to be taken for granted.

Giving these tools to teach the elderly is a great service to both children and parents.

On the functional level the videos, a spontaneous amateur production,  are not fully adapted to the needs and pace of the older population. The screenshots are blurred, not everybody has a Mac and the young presenters’ talk is not always coherent, yet –  it’s a grassroot initiative and an admirable one. Chapeau for their resourcefulness, awareness to the importance of enhancing the mature population to be more digitally savvy in an a simplistic and intuitive way and contribution to a softer digital based bonding between generations.

And on the same level, an equally admirable initiative at Google is a beautiful book that teaches young children about the internet – 20 things I learnt about browsers and the web. An elementary readers’ digest about the web, TCPIP, cookies, HTML, cloud computing….  I am sure much older children will be equally happy to learn about the what and why around the web and not just take its existence for granted.

These two initiatives, borne from an inclusive attitude,  connect the dots for digital immigrants and digital newbies.  This contribution to  facilitate, familiarize and bond  young and old to what is increasingly growing to become a natural part of our life fabric,  is another step in adapting our web to make it a real web of life.

Disclaimer: I am also a  partner at Senior-Touch, a company that focuses on bringing 3^rd age needs and usability into the process of developing products, services and bridging age related digital divide.

Facebook has reached its 500 million user and, has thus turned into a huge global digital social state. For the digital literate it has become an infrastructure commodity, almost as much as electricity, gas, water or as Google for search. Facebook is a window to a personalized tribal fire that gathers around it the relevant friends of an interacting individual for sharing moments, ideas, experiences, plans.

But what about me? How can I, the individual Facebook user, feel comfortable on this huge platform and still maintain the intimacy, selective privacy and trust within our social spheres that reside in this huge digital society?

  Facebook defines itself as a social utility that helps people communicate more efficiently with their friends, family and coworkers. The turbine that runs this infrastructure is a swarm of personal digital connections, conversations and exchange of informations and experiences. In such intricate cobwebs of personalized social spheres, its inherent increasing return cycle will bring about its exponential future growth with exponential privacy, control of personal data, trust and scope of personal interactions related issues and apprehensions, and on the other hand, will make it harder to leave, as it increasingly becomes a commodity magnet.

Does the huge expansion of Facebook mean that I can have more friends on my social graph? Will that be any criterion to my popularity, value or place? The Dunbar number of 150 as representative of the upper limit number of social relationships that we can manage on an individual level, is also much too high when it comes to meaningful digital sharing within ones social sphere.

The most burning questions is not FaceBook’s dominance in the social networks markets – it’s the place of the individual in such an omnivoring social commodity.

The individual personal prism is the differentiating factor that sorts out the noise, creates a relevance hierarchy of importance, significance and degree of ties. That is true for both sides – me, the user, who wants to share with relevant people around relevant interactions, as well as providers and advertisers who want to target relevant customers for their offerings and not just shoot into the crowd.

Every personalized Facebook page becomes a personal pillar of individualism, shared through the eyes of the beholder with her Facebook friends. This individualized personal prism creates singular pages in a huge global yellow pages like digital address book.

Ideally, entrance, sharing and participation in these personalized windows to the digital lives of the owners’ pages are restricted to the friends and friends of friends of that individual.

In reality, flocks of hungry advertisers lurk under these windows, plotting  how to enter these personalized circles and harness the private social spheres. Their aim is to turn  those trusting friends under the auspices of the individual camp fire, to their advocates, ambassadors and evangelists to their offerings, be it through willing participation or  piggybacking by turning social sphere lists into social graphs in social marketing mixes.

From my point of view, I, the user, want to be in control of what I share with whom, how and by what degree of connectedness. It is subjective, individual, dynamic, and transcends the boundaries of Facebook as a connectivity platform.

My context in Facebook, is a beacon that should shine for my entourage, and only if I choose to, be made available, under my explicit consent, to be shared as part of a commercial CRM effort.

Yet my Facebook context is not separated from my overall context as I surf the web, search, converse, communicate, read and interact.

Restricting context to my Facebook interactions, even if they are part of a huge global social infrastructure, does not reflect my whole context as a person. I call a world that will have a personalized contextual prism – Contextivity.

Contextivity  is about MY Context all through, across platforms, providers and predefined issues. Contextivity turns imprisoned, fragmented personalization into  a harmonized experience that meshes my context with connectivity. It makes my digital choices and interactions natural, intuitive, gives it my personal colors.

Facebook’s platform is perfectly situated to become a central junction that combines connectivity to context and become the infrastructure for digital relations, based on selective context lens, relevant to a specific exchange, a true personal experience.

However, once such holistic contextification services are developed, that very combination makes it all the more acute that all context based activities remain user side, in her control and not be owned or manipulated by any single provider, especially as big and fundamental in the utility like service it provides, like Facebook .

Charlene Li ‘s post Google Buzz and kids – parental control nightmare in which she describes the way  she found out how her 9 years old daughter was exposed by Google  Buzz through what for the little girl was an innocent post, is something all parents need to be aware of.  Many naively assume that their kids’ exposure through social platforms is a 21st century youngsters’ lifestyle in a totally connected digital universe.  Not all parents have the tools and skills to see what their kids do in social environments that are not kid friendly, or direct their kids to safe zones and instruct them against the pitfalls of social platforms and such faux pas like Buzz.

Same goes for older people who pride themselves on mastering email. Many have Gmail, which has almost become a commodity, are most likely unaware of  Buzz and its implications, or at best don’t touch a new button on their screen that they don’t know what to do with and are afraid to activate for fear it will cause something they will not know to undo. Older generations are much more privacy oriented in their web interactions than the net generations.  It is very important to bridge digital divide through a universal inclusive approach of facilitating, but automating features in the name of user friendliness can have a dark side to it.

It is our call to speak up in the name of all those who are not sophisticated, skilled or aware enough to understand the privacy and safety breaches done by corporates who do not practice enough social responsibility to make sure that potential users are fully aware of what they are entering into and are given an active choice. Fine print in a Terms of Service section that 90% of the population doesn’t read is good for liabilities and lawyers but not for our kids and grandparents. We cannot afford to wait for corporates to show the accountability that should go with their role as providers of mainstream platforms.

School systems should develop learning programs, instructional lessons and learning communities like ConnectYard that teach the skills necessary to raise our children into aware youngsters and adults. It is up to us and our educational systems to adapt learning to modern perils and safety needs.

But most of all – the quality, safety, privacy and accountability for our digital life is up to us – it should be in our hands. Up to us to stir awareness and call upon people to take an active part in setting the climate that will empower a paradigm shift towards users’ mastery of their digital life. Protecting us from the “Only Connect” moves of social platforms calls for a paradigm shift.

In a nutshell:

• No commercial corporate, acting for its own capital gain, should own my data or have the ability to manipulate or expose it unsolicited.
• No commercial entity should arbitrarily and unilaterally dictate what additional offerings become integrated to the services and what their consequences are to me – and force me to struggle to undo what they decided for me should be automatically activated.
• The only person that is allowed to have the keys to my personal data and the segregations I want to make about my interactions is me.
• Ownership of my data, my visibility and my sharing handles should be at my sole control.

Our social web is as only as strong as its weakest link.  We should strive for a web fabric that is safe, transparent, trustworthy and accommodating all users in all degrees of vulnerability. It is up to us to make it happen.

“You know you’ve achieved perfection in design, not when you have nothing more to add, but when you have nothing more to take away.”  Antoine de Saint- Exupery

A disclosure note: I am also a partner in  Senior-Touch, a 3^rd age expert house

Digital offerings for a netizens’ oriented world are primarily designed from a web based lifestyle that suits the Net generation, for whom the order of the day is apps, gadgets, tools and more revolutions.

 The Net generation is confident, empowered, self-reliant, attuned to the digital culture of choices, sharing, visual signs, high speed, their connectivity and the way they process information is different, it’s natural, intuitive, flowing. It’s a generation that is eager for changes – to make changes and to dynamically adapt to changes as they come their way.  

 The older generations, the digital immigrants of various levels and ages are more hesitant, tend to stick to what they are familiar with and used to, their web lifestyle stems from the level of adoption of communication platforms and tools that suit their lifestyle. They use cell phones but get lost with smart phones, use email but in the social media scene appear as rigid elephants on a swinging dancing floor.

 The digital embarrassment line does not divide just between old and young. There’s even a micro generations’ gap where 3-4 years apart age wise create a totally different technological experience. 19 years old  seem outdated to 16 years old, at the age of 20 the ability to digitally multitask is much smaller than at the age of 15.  A research note written by a 15 years old on his generations’ media consumption caused a stir in the market, a thought provoking insight on what works and doesn’t work for teen agers’ digital interactions as it proved contrary to what adult experts assume –  how they use their computers for music, Twitter is not hot, online ads don’t work, TV is hardly an option, they watch TV only on demand and mostly via the web

Apple unveils the  ipad – the best way to experience the web , they say. A big stir all over. Digital ink is spilt over the good and bad of the ipad, the revolution to come, the flops, the technology challenges, lack of Flash, USB, memory limitations….. all the geeks, experts and intuitive users dance the waggle dance. All for Netizens.

Ethan Nicholas, a guest writer in Techcrunch – made a completely different point.

Why my Mom’s next computer is going to be an ipad. He says:

 The iPad is a computer for people who don’t like computers. People who don’t like the idea of upgrading their 3D drivers, or adjusting their screen resolution, or installing new memory. Who don’t understand why their computer gets slower and slower the longer they own it, who have 25 icons in their system tray and have to wait ten minutes for their system to boot up every day.

For what most of these people need a computer for, the iPad is perfect. It doesn’t do as many things as a “real” computer does, but the things it does do it does in a way even non-tech-savvy people can figure out, and there are far fewer ways to screw it up. So if you have managed to convince yourself that the iPad is a useless, locked-up DRM-laden failure of a ‘computer’ before even touching one, I have two words for you:

My mom

My mother is a lovely lady in her sixties who is… well, “not computer savvy” is probably a good way to put it. I regularly have to figure out why her computer is running incredibly slowly, or why it won’t print, or any of the million other random things that happen when people who don’t live and breathe computers sit down at one daily.

The iPad is perfect for her. It does exactly what she needs. It will let her watch movies and listen to music and read books on long flights. It will make using a computer fun instead of an annoying chore……

And you know what? There are millions upon millions of people just like her out there. They outnumber us. And they finally have a chance to become productive, self-sufficient computer users instead of constantly asking family members to fix their computers or, even worse, keeping the Geek Squad in business.

No, the iPad isn’t for everyone. But I’m going to go on record as saying that, for non-computer-geeks everywhere, the iPad is going to redefine computing.

 

Exactly. It is this capturing of a universal user experience that will make the ipad a  digital savior. It will transform the experience in means more intuitive and familiar, as a universal design product, sexy for all-  so people at all age and usability sophistication level  feel included – part of the global digital town square. The ipad provides a “black box with a very lively façade”  older people will not be intimidated by it as a computer, touch will facilitate familiarization and accommodate declining finger dexrticity.

Digital literacy and digital proficiency are not to be taken for granted.  We live in an age where for the first time in history there will be more old people than young. Life longevity brings with it mature life style needs and styles and an urge to remain part of the global society.

A web that is for all should be made of offerings that weave humanity into user designs of the services, tools, apps and gadgets that empower the dynamic digital lifestyle. An inclusive design should compassionately consider the capabilities and contingencies of those not so savvy, without patronizing them in an attitude of “for the XXX challenged”.

A user friendly product, service, application or GUI  that is nice to have to a Net Gen savvy, is a must have to people who are immigrants into the digital world and for whom it would never be intuitive. It is an age of customization, personalization, usability and features’ adaptation – but not everybody can do it.

Older people are technophobes. It excludes them from digital advances. They tend to give up on offerings with which they feel uncomfortable, and many times refrain from using technologies, where accessibility and usability are not usually adapted to their perceptual, motor and cognitive pace of reaction.

 Their desire for a total user experience is shadowed by the fear of not being able to properly apply the necessary skills or not be able to interact with the application in a timely manner. They would rather give up on the potential, in order not to feel inferior.

There’s a psychological catch as well. Whereas all through history the skills, knowledge and authority were transferred from the old to the young, in the digital world  many times even  young children master skills that older people can hardly relate to, if at all. 

Digital literacy means new capabilities, a language of the information world that youngsters speak fluently. Services that to them are natural, communication platforms, instant messaging, e-commerce, consulting e-maps, sophisticated search, locations, peers, scheduling and much more, are totally unfamiliar to a population that can make good use of the quality of life enhancing capabilities that new technologies bring.

A whole new universal and inclusive user friendly approach to self-activation and interaction with digital devices and services is called for.  One that will facilitate, simplify and connects us all under the umbrella of a web of life that suits each of us personally.

Language is live and vibrant, it reflects times, styles, state of mind. Net lingo, emoticons and texting abbreviations do not imply cultural inadequacy, just as formal traditional language does not necessarily spell canonized skills, but can very well be a generational trait.

The Net generation has been described as having the attention span of a flee – telegraphic, short, concise, to the point, moving on.

Are students failing English due to FaceBook  and Twitter? 

A Canadian press  article claims that the  free-form writing style of social networks like Twitter and Facebook is changing the way people communicate, and causing students to fail English. It definitely changes communications, but I doubt that this is the reason they fail English.

Which English?

Conveying a strong idea in 140 characters is a lot more complicated than detailing it over 700 pages.

An assignment was given to literature students: write a 6 word story, involving elements of mystery, sex and religious belief.  The winning entry was:” Oh God, I’m pregnant, by whom?”

Is this texting or writing? Borders blurred.

To the Net generation  reading Tolstoy’s 1500 pages of  War and Peace  may seem anachronistic, because in their culture the evolution of books will manifest by  including video clips of mood and scene setting, instead of long chapters of landscape,  furniture and clothes description.

Does how we express ourselves define who we are? In a homogenous culture – probably. In a heterogeneous versatile digital world, where we use a plethora of devices and communication platforms – the medium and the device are the message. Emoticons as visual emotion and mood expressions inside a text, or abbreviations as concise signaling,  are new culture and communication codes that broaden the scope of communication, not reflect on the level of its users.

I am a literate expressive boomer, and still I would naturally insert , GTG (got to go) or C U L8R (see you later).  I will pour out my mind in a  word doc,  but will converse in a manner that includes abbreviations and emoticons in IM or SMS.

Because I am a digital immigrant and not a native, in my case, no one would classify it as lack of perseverance, discipline and focus. The only writing I literally perform is filling a check or a shopping list – I type all the rest. Does it make me illiterate or adaptive?

 It’s all in the eyes of the beholder. Changing minds, changing styles are not bad or good. They are different. Lack of adaptivity to new forming styles and clinging to known and established norms, do not have to spell superiority, it can very well be interpreted as rigidity, stagnation….  Therefore I believe that it should be considered  not  as signs of  a decaying culture, but rather as expressions of medium based usability.  Texting is for high speed processing. Writing – for vocalizing complex opinions and feelings.

The Net generation, at the forefront of technological and social innovations, is not shallow or undisciplined – they multitask in various writing styles expressions.

Nicholas Carr believes that in a texting world, writing will remain in a debased form. Deconstructing traditional writing patterns and reconstructing new forms that comply with the instantaneous culture and real time platforms is a sign of an evolving culture – these are the semiotics of combining traditional with state of the art.

When change is the only constant – only adapt!

This is an open request to authors and publishers – when you release a new book – please make an e-reader version available immediately as well.

Times are changing. There’s an overpour of new books every hour. I, your customer, want my book here and now.

Please indulge me.

The digital world will create a new future  for books. Their digitization will empower new formats, marketing and availability. The future of books is eBooks. E-readers will dramatize the concept of conventional books and will create new long tail marketing schemes. That will  happen in a gradual process.

But right now, till all the troops are aligned, and the chasms are crossed, we, readers, are ready now, on the single book level.

 It is such fun, when you are waiting for a new book to be published – to have it in your hands to read the minute it’s out.

In our flat world this immediacy is possible by replacing shipment with download, if it is not in a bookstore next to me. The future of books is e-readers of sorts.

 Please enhance the adoption curve by connecting it with the spontaneity of an instant gratification.

I am a book lover. I grew up on the scent of a “fresh” book straight from the printer’s warehouse. But today’s globalization and digitalization offer new kinds of instant gratification and new modes of being intoxicated by the ability to read your favorite author or update on your favorite subject on the dot.

It is part of the new digital belonging – being able to be part of a global conversation around the publishing of a new book and the conversations around it,   -

I am not going to go into the commercial considerations of a proprietary edition like the kindle or general eBook options, but either way, the benefits are huge:

• There’s an increasing return cycle – the more books will come out in an eBook version – the more publishers and authors will make it a mainstream application
• No paper… saves so many rainforests.
• Makes reading a more intuitive and comfortable experience
• Product versioning – good for marketers.
• The future of book marketing
• And maybe the most important – one more happy customer.

So next time I am being notified that the book I was waiting for was published – please make it available for me however and whenever I want it.

Privacy is a very personal matter. It is age, culture, country….. and personality related. Online and offline we are basically the same person, even if we choose to act differently in the physical and virtual worlds.

Is privacy dead? That’s a long  and old debate. Has anything fundamental changed?

Stowe Boyd challenges traditional definitions of publicy and privacy and claims that because of the fundamental difference between the physical and virtual worlds, we cannot translate physical world notions of privacy into the virtual world, where interactions are only time and not place related. Because of new definitions of publicy  in the new decade, privacy will disappear.

I beg to differ.

The web has added a new dimension to our interactions. Technologies and platforms empower its etheric nature  to become an extension of the physical world with communication ubiquity almost a natural reality.  Today, you don’t need to be physically somewhere in order to be there. Phone calls, video conferencing, camera enhanced chats, emails, blogs, tweets….  Empower your presence in other than its physical manifestations.

As the web increasingly becomes our natural habitat, as individuals we have the same rights to disclose at our will information about ourselves.  It has nothing to do with our physical presence. As an increasing part of our interactions is web borne, rules, practices, codes of conduct and dos and don’t , apply to our feeling of well being, safety, privacy security.

It is individual.

The notion of a private home can be equaled on the web to a private self, the right to individually decide if and to what extent open or close the  personal information tap. Just as in the physical world I can and should  feel anxious about the way in which I can be monitored and traced by surveillance cameras and tracking of my whereabouts through my cellular device, so I can and should be worried about the ways in which I am monitored and targeted online unknowingly and without my consent.

My information IS my property. Look at the billions$ industries that evolve around online informations. There is hardly today any aspect that does not have an online arm as a commercial entity and with means of communications.

Geo-spatial of the physical and temporal aspects of the virtual are not criteria by which my personal data can and should be compromised. There is a lot about gender, age-group, ethnicity… that is obvious in the physical world once someone looks at you and can be easily concealed or distorted online – but as a human being it does not make me less entitled to have the keys in my hands as to  how much I open the door, to whom and under what circumstances.

Privacy infringement is mostly about profitability, brand power struggles and business hegemony. Old battles fought now  in new waters.  Corporates’ interests in our private information travel freely between the physical and virtual worlds. When consentual supply is not enough for the growing demand for our data, private information piracy, in the name of quality of service, supposedly for our own good, is not legitimate and should not be  encouraged or taken as a lesser evil, online or offline.

The new frontier  for this battle is now our virtual social spheres – virtual social habitats to which they want to tap into, wherever we are, eager  for our info and use us, many times without us even being aware , for their marketing purposes.

The augmented sociality, as Stowe Boyd calls it, enables us to remain faceless in the social sphere, and so our interactions remain faceless. He claims that

Those raised in this brave new world are already living in a cultural context based on publicy, and therefore they are running afoul of social conventions based on privacy. Publicy says that each self exists in a particular social context, and all such contracts are independent.

I see the expression of the self in the virtual world differently. As it is about people, the individually personal context in which we interact within our social spheres, is what humanizes the virtual publicy. I believe that each of us is the sum total of all our interactions, not in a particular social context, but as part of a totally harmonized webbing presence. We are Itoms in a people’s grid. As such it gives us the right to completely cloak, openly share all or partially expose as per relevance to a certain interaction or social thread.

No doubt the digital natives, born into a web based reality have different attitudes and views than boomers who are a product of physical world concepts, but the borders of private sharing and public displaying remain a very personal decision. An interesting survey conducted among 2500 youngsters about their privacy concerns in their interactions in social networks indicated that private may be extended, in their eyes, from a private self, to the boundaries of that social sphere, but within that perimeter, they have privacy concerns that put clear boundaries between virtual privacy and publicy.

To top that, the web is not just about generations x, y,z. Today, for the first time in history, there are more older people than younger, and with life longevity, for many years to come, digital natives and digital immigrants, importing to the web different world views and exposure norms, will live side by side, equal citizens in the virtual space, and all should have accessibility to publicy and privacy practices that suit each of them individually.

Once you refute the assumption that specific social norms applicable online or offline must gain the consent of a significant majority to become a legitimate life practice, and embrace an attitude that regards each individual’s equal prerogatives to decide for herself the spectrum of her privacy boundaries, there is no blurring or confusion.

The technological capabilities of cross referencing private information about me  and what I share with my friends from various social spheres I am present at, data mining from commercial sites, public sector databases, can have privacy implications in the real world, as  civilians and as people in a free society.

The fluxing of the notions of publicy and privacy and legitimization  of breaches of privacy norms in the name of a new virtual publicy, are dangerous, because they can lead to anarchy with blurred boundaries between virtual and physical, and the implications can be far reaching.

How can you find a needle in the web’s haystack?

Endless availability (content, services, and social platforms) makes it difficult to sort out the noise. Using the web as an integral part of how we live – a web of life, overwhelms; world flattening is not without a price.

Information glut… a flood of web socializing platforms… makes attention our scarcest resource.

24 hours a day and no attention to spare.

Wealth of information creates scarcity of attention. How can I filter out the clutter, gate out irelevance  and optimize my ROA (return on attention)?

 Managing an attention economy in this monsoon of digital interactions is a major impasse for taking the evolving web experience into the next level.

 Personal relevance impasse – personal relevance is an anchor for making personal sense out of all the digital information and communication overpoud.  For enabling  a reasonable ROA ,what I interact with must be in my context, relevant to me, answering my needs, relevant to what I happen to be doing right now, in relation to my past activities, my social relations, my commercial relations… Today my relevance is balkanized in siloed sites, behind walled gardens of providers who struggle to keep me captive, as a means for their profit making mechanisms.

Privacy impasse – To have it in my context, I must expose private information. We were  led to believe that it is a necessary evil, which is for our own good.  I don’t like exposing, and even if I do, I must depend today on one sided privacy and trust management policies of providers. Do I trust them? Do they abuse this trust? Do they walk the walk or just talk the talk? Is there a real way for me to find out?

Portability impasse – Even with my limited trust, the relevant experience I can be provided with, is at best segmented and confined to the walled garden of a specific provider. And what about all the others? I cannot freely move between providers taking my accumulating context with me at my service wherever I go. What good is my profile in Amazon when I google a question? When change is the only constant, any rigid profile I might have with any provider, becomes obsolete the minute I leave the site. My versatile dynamics exceed by far any gated provider or community.

Adaptivity impasse- My freedom is furthered burdened by lack of spontaneity and intuitiveness. When I choose to go elsewhere, whenever I need to interact with something new, I need to learn how to operate it all anew. For my benefit they should be adapting to me, to my way of doing things. Why should I have to learn anew how to send mail for each mail system  and not have the system learn my  sending  mail habits?

These four elements limit today my ability to have a flowing web experience that will turn the web into “my web of life” and promise us, users,  a manageable attention economy.