The impasses towards a manageable web of life
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.
