Participation Literacy
Week# 4 Information Overload or Filter Failure?
Trebor Scholz | LCST 3073 A | Spring 2009

week 2
Conversation:
Overview, Getting Started Democracy and Blogging
week 1 Conversation:
week 3
Privacy and Social Networking
Attention Overload:
Search, Filter, Content Aggregation
Collective Action:
week 4 week 5 Flash Mobs, Activism, and Micro-Blogging
week 6
Collaboration:
week 7 Spring Break
Wikis, Wikipedia, Mashups Collaboration:
Collaborative Writing
week 8
Collaboration:
week 9
Social Mapping
Sharing
Cooperation: Media Sharing
week 10
Sharing
week 11
Referral, Tagging, Folksonomies Sharing
Piracy and File Sharing
week 12
week 13 Sharing
week 14 Copyright and Virtual Worlds
Social Bookmarking
Social Music Sites
week 15
Social Cataloging Sites
Trebor Scholz | LCST 3073 A | Spring 2009

Upcoming Requirements
Group project: Video conversation about the readings (due Feb 12 before class) 10%
RSS assignment (due Feb 19 before class) 10%
Twitter assignment (due Feb 26 before class) 10%
Trebor Scholz | The New School University | Eugene Lang | LCST 2031 A | Spring 2009

Attention Overload:
Search, Filter, Content
Aggregation
week 4
Feb 17, 19
Required Reading:
John Palfrey and Urs Gasser, \"Overload,\" John Palfrey and Urs Gasser, Born Digital (New York:
Basic Books, 2008) 185-208.
Lab:
RSS, Twitter, TweetGrid, Combining RSS tags
Video:
RSS in Plain English
Reference:
http://delicious.com/Trebor/rss
Thursday:
Attention Economy: The Game
Trebor Scholz | LCST 3073 A | Spring 2009

Information Overload is Nothing New

‘We have reason to fear that the multitude of books which grows every
day in a prodigious fashion will make the following centuries fall into a state
as barbarous as that of the centuries that followed the fall of the Roman
Empire.'
Adrien Baillet (1685) Reading Strategies for Coping with Information Overload.
A. Blair. 2003. Journal of the History of Ideas. 64:11-28.

“Memex”
http://tinyurl.com/39mf8l
http://tinyurl.com/3b7h9v

Why More Is Less: The Paradox of Choice
Barry Schwartz
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VO6XEQIsCoM

Continuous Partial Attention
“To pay continuous partial attention is to pay partial attention -- CONTINUOUSLY. It is
motivated by a desire to be a LIVE node on the network. [...] We want to effectively scan for
opportunity and optimize for the best opportunities, activities, and contacts, in any given
moment. [...] We pay continuous partial attention in an effort NOT TO MISS ANYTHING.
-Linda Stone
http://www.openthefuture.com/2006/08/continuous_partial_social_atte.html

NOSO is a real-world platform for temporary disengagement from social networking
environments. The NOSO experience offers a unique opportunity to create NO
Connections by scheduling NO Events with other NO Friends.
http://nosoproject.com/

Concentration: sure, but... who can afford to
completely detach from email?
“I have been a happy man ever since January 1, 1990, when I no longer had an
email address. I'd used email since about 1975, and it seems to me that 15
years of email is plenty for one lifetime.
Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to
be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the
bottom of things. What I do takes long hours of studying and
uninterruptible concentration.“
Prof. Donald E. Knuth
http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/email.html

How to fight habitual dependency on the Internet
•Observe your Internet browsing habits.
•One day a week completely without Internet.
•Establish the habit of daily “offline hours” (no IM, no email, no twitter)
You may be astonished how much work you will get done.
•Try to preschedule the times when you go online
Set aside certain times of the day when you will check your messages.
A few practical suggestions about email use:
20 minutes in the morning should be sufficient to read all emails, and write short
responses to emails of low importance, delete uncaught spam and file away emails
that require in-depth responses. You will end up with an empty inbox and can
now schedule time for long responses.

New Ethic
Make mistakes well
•
Life is a beta
•
Be honest
•
Be transparent
•
Collaborate
•
Don’t be evil
•
(from: www.buzzmachine.com/what‐would‐google‐do/)

10 Guidelines for Web Credibility
BJ Fogg - Stanford University
Design your page with a professional look (or one that is appropriate for your purpose).
Make it easy to verify the accuracy of the information on your site.
Highlight the expertise in your organization.
Show that honest and trustworthy people stand behind your site.
Make it easy to contact you.
Make your site easy to use-- and useful.
Update your site’s content often (or, at least show that it has been reviewed).
Use restraint with any promotional content.
Avoid errors of all types, no matter how small they seem.
source for this slide: http://www.slideshare.net/bjfogg/web-credibility-bj-fogg-stanford-university

IN-CLASS: 45 mins
Attention Economy: The (Paper-Based) Game
by Ulises A. Mejias
SOURCE: http://blog.ulisesmejias.com/2008/02/22/attention-economy-the-game/
(modified by Trebor Scholz)

Tools for Filtering and
Time Management
Every day, the most difficult thing I have to do is to determine what to ignore.

Freedom
Freedom is an application that disables networking on an Apple computer for up to eight hours at a time. Freedom will free you from the distractions of the
internet, allowing you time to code, write, or create. At the end of your selected offline period, Freedom re-enables your network, restoring everything as
normal. Freedom enforces freedom; a reboot is the only circumvention of the Freedom time limit you specify. The hassle of rebooting means you're less
likely to cheat, and you'll be more productive. When first getting used to Freedom, I suggest using the software for short periods of time.
download: http://www.ibiblio.org/fred/freedom/images/Freedom.dmg

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1887

http://www.geuzen.org/cgi-bin/shmoogle/shmoogle_form.cgi

http://www.google.com/alerts

tweetgrid.com

http://labs.daylife.com/custom-feed/builder.php
http://labs.daylife.com/custom-feed/builder.php

http://www.tweetdeck.com/beta/

http://search.twitter.com/

http://www.snackr.net/

http://nytexplorer.com/articles/search?query=gaza&commit=Explore!

http://www.smileonmymac.com/TextExpander/index.html

http://www.collectivate.net/journalisms/2005/11/19/downtime.html

Trebor Scholz
The New School University
scholzt@newschool.edu
Twitter: trebors
This presentation is made public using a creative commons attribution, non-commercial, share alike license.