Transcript

00:00:00 - Speaker 1: Being able to do important and deep work in a world where information is not scarce, but abundant, not only abundant, but so abundant that it essentially becomes a problem.

Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Muse is a software for your iPad that helps you with ideation and problem solving. This podcast isn’t about Muse product, it’s about Muse the company and the small team behind it.

My name is Adam Wiggins. I’m here today with my colleague Mark McGrenigan. How’s it going, Mark? Alright, Adam, how are you doing? Yeah, I’m doing well.

Reading an interesting book about the life of Claude Shannon, the guy that invented information theory.

So this was at Bell Labs circa I guess middle of the last century. Uh, for example, the, uh, that seminal paper coined the term bit, which I think I, I almost take for granted sometimes these fundamental inventions, you think, well, it’s just always, we’ve always known what a bit is, but in fact, boiling information down to a stream of ones and zeros and being able to reason about that mathematically is a uh an extremely significant breakthrough to put the, to put it mildly and surprisingly recent from my perspective.

Yeah, interesting. So our topic today is the information age, and I usually put information age in caps. It’s in comparison to say the Iron Age or the industrial revolution. And I guess the the basic idea with this is that humanity or society has entered an era that’s defined by the I guess the massive availability and the free flow of information. This dates back to, I think the Wikipedia page talked about the invention of the transistor which kind of made possible things. Like global telephone networks and radio and TV, but obviously the computer as well came out of that. I think it’s become particularly cute or the information age and how different that is from what came before is really dramatic in the last 10 years or so, uh, with smartphones and the internet and social media. Uh, one statistic I read recently, I found a little Uh, mind blowing was that the essentially there’s total penetration of internet and smartphones, the stat I read was that there’s 5 or 5.5 billion people on Earth who are over the age of 15, so adults, and of those 5 billion of them have some kind of mobile phone and about 4 billion of them have smartphones. So for our purposes. Again, everyone’s connected, and now this new age is kind of defined by that.

00:02:35 - Speaker 2: Well, that’s a broad and weighty topic. What’s on your mind about the information age then?

00:02:39 - Speaker 1: Yeah, well, obviously connects to to muse here because we see it. As a tool that helps with this, which is particularly for creative professionals and being able to do important and deep work in a world where information is not scarce, but abundant, not only abundant, but so abundant that the it essentially becomes a problem. I read a nice article the other day called the Information Pathology.

And they make this comparison to how in the 20th century, the abundance of food sort of slipped our widespread health problems from not enough nutrition, not enough calories, which essentially is a problem most humans had faced most of their lives or, you know, most of the existence of, uh, certainly civilization and flipped it over to now we’re worried about essentially having access to too much food, that the problems are obesity and uh diabetes and heart disease and so forth.

And the author here makes a comparison to say, well, maybe in the 21st century, we have a similar thing with information, where we’re also hardwired in many ways to seek information, that new information is a way to be. Prepared for what the future might hold, assess our safety and do things to improve our lives when you know things about what’s going on in the world around you that can be extremely helpful to say the least.

But then you add in this era of hyperconnectivity and the 24 hour news cycle and social media and newsletters and everything’s being pushed to you all the time and everything seems important. And that can quickly turn into more of a gambler at a slot machine getting the the dopamine hit from that next, um, that next piece of information rather than, yeah, rather than spending your life on things that are more meaningful to the point that we have people thinking about things like digital detox and Deleting social media from their apps and this is, this is quite a big topic now of how you actually manage this problem of information abundance.

00:04:38 - Speaker 2: Yeah, you had shared that article with me, and I found it very interesting and indeed alarming. The topic of food and nutrition is one that I’d studied for a while, and that’s an area where there’s something that’s incredibly important, but over the past 100 years.

So we’ve really lost the plot and it’s caused an enormous amount of damage to us as individuals and as a society, and we haven’t fully confronted or even understood that 50 or 100 years in. So if you analogize that to the information age, it could very well be the case that we are, you know, victims of our own own abundance here in ways that we don’t and perhaps won’t understand for another decades or even. 10 years.

And that’s a pretty alarming thought.

00:05:15 - Speaker 1: It’s hard to know whether it will be on that same scale, but I certainly feel that certainly the the change in our daily lives as humans and the changes to our society of the information age broadly is huge and dramatic.

I, I do think it’s on par with the industrial revolution. We we don’t know yet because we’re not far enough to do it, but that’s, that’s my gut feel going from there to, well, such big changes in the world will bring both positive and negative.

And there’s obviously many positives to having access to essentially unlimited information all the time, uh, but there’s also many negatives, and I don’t think we’re going to figure that out in the next few years. I think it’s going to be an ongoing process of society adapting and figuring out.

Um, how to, how to manage this and try to get the good parts and leave behind the bad bits.

00:06:03 - Speaker 2: So how do you start to grapple with that? What’s good about the information age and what’s struggle?

00:06:08 - Speaker 1: Yeah, well, I think the, you know, what’s good in terms of access to all the world’s information at your fingertips is almost so obvious that it hardly needs stating, but You know, Wikipedia is amazing, Google is amazing, uh, Twitter is amazing. Uh, you can get access to information that could be relevant to your career. Certainly if you’re a person that does creative, you know, you’re creative professionally do knowledge work of some kind, which probably anyone listening to this podcast, it’s likely in that category, having access to so much is extremely powerful for your career.

Uh, and also in your life, right, making decisions about Important life things like parenthood or adopting a pet or taking care of an aging parent or buying a home or any health things, and the abundance of information, you can get personal experiences, you can get academic information. You can download books, you can watch videos on YouTube, you can become, let’s say not become an expert, but you can completely absorb yourself in almost everything humanity knows about any subject at any time, from the comfort of your own home, uh, even just on your phone, if you choose to do that.

One personal anecdote I give from my life about how kind of information and particularly broad, let’s say more like global news has an impact on your life. Uh, with the pandemic that of course we’re still in the midst of here in in 2020, but when that came along, I was alerted to it essentially by basically a lot of people being alarmed on Twitter, and that caused me to stop and think, yeah, let me look into this briefly and kind of do my own research, which, you know, for me was making a use board and pulling out a few relevant bits onto that so I could kind of poke them around and try to make, make sense of it. And I’m really glad I did because a few weeks later, someone that I live with basically had a close encounter where basically her school, her entire school was shut down due to someone there uh testing positive and then suddenly there’s all these, you got. quarantine, you got to do this, you got to do that. And I think that would have been really surprising and disorienting and upsetting if I hadn’t already been studying exactly what was going on with this. And instead, I said, oh, OK, I actually have my head around this. I know what to do and um that information being not just that I went out to seek, but actually being pushed to me through these, uh, through social media and through through news channels turned out to be very helpful in making good decisions and uh. Essentially it was, it was information that had an impact on my life.

So how do you think about uh the information age? Do you, first of all, I guess do you agree with me, uh, we, we didn’t talk about it before, but do you agree with me that it does have, you know, an impact, such, such an outsized impact potentially, and, uh, where do you see the, the, the, you know, the, the benefits to you or humanity at large and likewise the Downsides.

00:09:05 - Speaker 2: Certainly I think there is a big impact from the information age. I think that’s hard to deny.

An interesting insight I got from a book called The Rise and Fall of American Growth, though, is that as seemingly as important as the information age is, it’s, it still hasn’t kind of fully impacted the whole real economy and our, our entire physical world.

Uh, this book makes a point that if you look at the, the economy of developed nations, it’s things like housing, healthcare, education, caring for children and elderly people, uh, things like this comprise much of the economy, and those have, you know, started to be affected by the information age around the edges for sure.

You have like Zillow for real estate, for example, but the way that we build homes is basically the same. As it is 40 years ago, but you have a nest on the wall that connects to Google. Um, so in that sense, I think there’s potentially actually a lot more that could happen as computing and information pervades more of our real physical lives.

Now, now that said, I think certainly it’s already been very impactful and and in my line of work, I enjoy a lot of those benefits, but potentially a lot more to go.

And the other thing I would say is, I don’t think we understand the full impact and implications of all these new information flows. Again, I think the analogy to food and nutrition is very useful, where it took us decades to begin to unravel all the weird stuff we were doing to our bodies and our societies, um, with these new food pathways. I’m afraid we’re going to go through the same experience with all these information flows.

00:10:27 - Speaker 1: Well, to bring it back down to the personal level, I guess one question that I see a lot of people grapple with is how to have a healthy relationship with, they usually say technology or social media, but I think of it as the information fire hose being connected to the whole of humanity and everything that it is thinking about and it’s going on because it’s a powerful feeling, this feeling of being informed or in the loop or connected.

And you know, whatever that may mean for you, it might be connected to your field or connected to a smaller community that has a private group, but it could also be connected to global news and what you do is you end up or what I often hear people talking about and and face myself a little bit, which is how do you, for example, spend less time on social media and more time reading books.

So for example, um, the YouTuber and podcaster CGP Gray. Uh, did a pretty substantial, not quite a digital detox, but basically got off social media and all this sort of thing for some period of time with the justification of, I want us to take more walks in the wood and woods and read more books, and I hear a variation of that a lot, people. I don’t know, maybe in Silicon Valley, people go on their 10 day meditation retreat, they don’t speak and they don’t bring technology with them, and you even see things like software specifically made for this, uh, even as far back as when I was in Y Combinator, which is now 13 years ago, uh, one of the folks in our batch was rescue Time, which is still operating today. It’s basically a plug-in for your computer that monitors how you’re spending your time and helps direct you away from the You know, spending time on Reddit or whatever and towards things that you define as productive how you define those things, which of course is especially confusing for a knowledge worker, I think because you have stuff like Slack and email being connected to your company’s sphere and I think it can have kind of the same quality of being connected to the news cycle or uh sort of the global global news, which is always some new thing, you know, I open up, I don’t know, notion, I open up slack, I open up Figma, I’ve got, you know, a little notification thing. Someone left a comment and someone’s done a new thing and there’s, you know, there’s someone’s pushed a new thing to Github. There’s always, there’s always some some new thing to follow and that becomes even more true as company gets bigger and more mature and that has some of the same quality where you can easily lose a lot of time in your day to these more reactive type things rather than the deep work or the bigger projects or prioritizing your own time.

And I think when Apple came along with screen time, that was also kind of an acknowledgement of that and I see people doing tricks there.

But I kind of see all of that stuff as as really like mitigation strategies, um, it’s it’s our short term hack for OK, we’ve recognized that losing your whole day to being on Twitter or spending too much time answering email or slack versus focus projects, you don’t feel good about that, you don’t feel like you’ve spent your time in a good way, but the techniques we have for managing that feel less like we found a way to live in harmony with the nature of the world and our information. flows and more like we’ve just put these little blocks in place in various places to again to try to manage that. So I’d love to figure out and I’m still exploring this for myself, but how to, how to live in harmony with the information fire hose and get the most of that, get as much from that as I can for my work, for my life, uh, while at the same time kind of avoiding some of the worst, the qualities of it, the addictive qualities or the qualities that in retrospect I feel like I. Spent my time well.

00:13:59 - Speaker 2: Yeah, for sure. First of all, I think you’re seeing this emerging intuition that information flows have different quality. Also, we’re seeing that there’s opportunity cost to spending your time with these different flows. Any time that you spend checking Reddit, for example, is time that you can’t spend with your family or exercising or what have you. But then I think there’s in the last 5 or 10 years, this has all been amplified by the social networks and the feeds, and there I think the situation is getting more.

Adversarial and intense because you have these companies that are motivated one way or another to engage you right with these, these feeds at the same time, the individuals like ourselves who are on the other end of this, we don’t have full-time people who are working to represent our side, you know, this harmonious engagement with information flows. So I think it’s not surprising to me that it feels like we’re kind of on our back foot, like we’re playing defense, like we’re trying to mitigate, like we’re trying to put our finger in the dam. Um, I think that’s a function of the structural situation that we’re in.

00:14:55 - Speaker 1: Again, that fits with the food metaphor where it’s easy to just put it all in the individual, and I think each of us can make healthy choices, but when you have a pretty serious, let’s call it infrastructural approach to making you want this thing, whether it’s fast food that’s designed to push all your primal buttons for sweet, savory and salty, and then on the information diet side of things, you’ve got. Some very, very smart people working for the Facebooks and Twitters and Instagrams of the world to get you to come back, re-engage, be involved in the feed.

So as an individual trying to use willpower to manage that is, is a challenge for sure.

One thing that my eyes on this quite a bit was I read this book Hooked back when I was working for a, for a company and at the time the book was circulating among the product people there saying, hey, there’s some interesting ideas here with, for example, using push notifications to help people re-engage with your app and for apps that are focused on active users and that sort of thing, that’s, that’s a desirable thing. And I remember reading this book and just having a sinking feeling in my stomach. This was, you know, I don’t know, 67 years ago. Having the sinking feeling in my stomach of a wait, we’re engineering things to sort of create these loops to bring you back according to not what’s most valuable to you or how you can get the most utility from whatever this product is, but just according to your, your natural desires of wanting to be connected or the orientation response or something like that. And actually the reading that book, which was not was not intended to be a cautionary tale at all as far as I know, uh, but that had a big impact on me and the next thing I did, which was, uh, start the ink and Switch research lab and one of our core ideas that we wanted to explore is OK, as technology and social media and the internet is taking on this new quality that’s going to be harder and harder to resist or hold at bay. How can makers and people who need to focus and get in the zone and do work, how can you manage that? How can we take back maybe some of the way that computing is made and the way that software uh works to better serve, I guess the user’s life goals or work goals rather than companies, let’s call them engagement goals.

00:17:20 - Speaker 2: Yeah, this is an insight from the ink and Switch lab that’s really grown on me over time.

I’ve come to appreciate how important it was.

There’s this world of call it consumer engagement based computing, which is really flourishing, like there’s a huge amount of investment and lots of great services, some of which I spend a bunch of time on like Twitter, um, and then there.

The enterprise computing world like B2BASS, which again is, is great. I spent a lot of my career working in that and there’s natural economic funding for those two worlds, but we really needed to make a deliberate effort to support this world of computing for creators for having better ideas.

So I’m glad we, we ended up working on that together at the lab.

00:17:53 - Speaker 1: One of the small areas there that I became aware of through the research that we did was the prevalence of notifications.

I think I mentioned earlier, like even something like notion or FIMA tends to have some kind of a notification thing. Even VS code, which is a, you know, a programming editor, has a little, you know, has some little like indicators that sort of uh click here, there’s something happening, something you need to know about. The red dots, man. red dot.

Sometimes if they’re they’ll make it a blue dot if they’re making it a little more chill, but yeah, the red dot badge put that on where we’re talking with Max recently about the no spinners thing and for me the no notifications basically respect the user’s attention and focus, don’t get in their way and Certainly don’t try to distract them or lure them away with that inbox feeling or there’s something I need to check. And it’s tricky because of course, there are times you do need to proactively let the user know something or maybe they they want to know, but certainly I hope news will never have anything resembling a notification segment.

00:18:52 - Speaker 2: Yeah, and speaking of notifications, this reminds me of another book in this in this genre, which is now a whole huge thing. There’s a bunch of books, you know, written along this vein, but this is digital minimalism, part of his thesis is that consumers are being constantly bombarded now by notifications and re-engagement loops and that you can, he argues should be more deliberate about how you engage with those platforms and do less of a notification based model and be more selective about how you engage in these information streams. Yeah.

00:19:18 - Speaker 1: Certainly, I put a lot of work into basically turning off almost all notifications on my devices. I have a couple of key things that go to my phone. Never want it from my desktop computer.

I had everything turned off on my iPad for my phone, I do have a couple of things, messages, emails that I do want to be notified about. I think of that as my communicator device, that’s purpose, so it makes sense that I would be notified there, but certainly I never want push notifications for something like breaking news or Twitter mention. or anything like that. I want to be more deliberate and even email um is something where I, you know, I like the model of check it in the morning and again in the afternoon rather than something that’s more interrupt driven.

But the nice thing about having the phone be the notification box uh is that I can turn off the ringer and put it face down someplace whenever I’m going to explicitly go into a work session and not be worried about, for example, being right in the middle of something and then suddenly my phone. Tablet and my computer are all chiming to get my attention for for a single thing.

00:20:16 - Speaker 2: And that perhaps seems like a small change, but I think managing my notifications has been really important, which is mostly turning them off, moving to a model where I choose if and when to engage with these different information streams. A similar one would be holding social media feeds. Again, the structural pattern there is that these sites really want you to go there and refresh all the time, which in some cases it’s, it’s hard to avoid because there’s no APIs, but wherever possible. I’ve I’ve moved to a model where these updates get batched, sent to me, and I can review them asynchronously. So for the Washington Post and Hacker News, for example, I get emails once a day for those, I check them at some point, but I’m not constantly refreshing.

00:20:50 - Speaker 1: Now, so far, most of these techniques we’ve mentioned here are things that let’s say are general, general purpose that basically social media and news and messages and emails is something essentially every human on the planet, more or less needs to needs to manage.

But then bringing it to the realm specifically of the knowledge worker, the creative professional or someone that is doing something that requires deep focus and they want to create, either as an individual or in groups, uh, there I feel like it becomes less clear.

There’s obviously those same techniques that individuals can use of managing your notifications or measuring screen time or something, but I was, I’ve also been struck by the number of techniques that I’ve seen seen emerge for let’s say more maker oriented activities. Which includes, for example, uh, pen and paper sketchbooks remain not only as popular as they ever were, but I almost feel like more so because it’s a place where you can go and write down your ideas and have information technology, which pen and paper certainly is at your disposal, there’s no risk of a notification popping up or being tempted to switch away and pop open Twitter or whatever. Then at the same time in groups, I’ve seen, for example, Sometimes it’s certainly it’s considered maybe a good habit to turn off your your ringer in a meeting, but I’ve also seen things like, OK, there’s a basket in the middle of the table, everyone put your phone there, and we do this just to enforce the discipline that we’ll all be here in presence in the moment and scribbling on the whiteboard and having the group discussion and not tempted to to switch away. And maybe I get a version of that as well with um using a Kindle hardware device to do my book reading, um, and there I like that I do get a lot of the benefits of digital, which is obviously I can have a lot of books in this one small device and I can highlight things and highlights go into a database and so forth, but it cannot do anything other than read books. So I stay really focused. Those were some techniques that struck me as kind of how you can do more, say, knowledge knowledge work type things in an information age, uh, that sort of holds the holds the fire hose at bay. Do you know of any uh techniques that you’ve seen or that you use for yourself in that nature?

00:22:52 - Speaker 2: techniques that I use tend to have that same flavor of pre-commitment, like you do.

Something upfront such that you, you sort of commit yourself and your knowledge work to doing the thing that you want to be doing, and you’re not constantly having to make the decision of should I be doing the work that I want to do, or should I be checking Twitter. Uh, so a big one for me has actually been reading books on paper. For a long time, I read books on my phone or my iPad with the Kindle app, which is nice. Uh, you get a lot of flexibility. Obviously, you can carry a zillion books, but I’ve always had the temptation. of checking the other apps on the phone, or even like thinking about it and having to decide not to, it ends up getting wired very deeply into you. I think if you use these devices a lot that you can, you know, press the home button and see all these shiny icons and click on them and get stuff. Um, so I’ve moved to a model of I read books on paper, even try to go sit physically away from my devices, you know, put them somewhere else. So it becomes a session that’s about the reading and the thinking.

00:23:40 - Speaker 1: I’ve even seen different social, let’s say reactions from others when you are, yeah, reading a paper book with a pen and paper sketchbook, even with my Kindle hardware, I think there’s a version of this which is when I, I also read books on my phone just using the Kindle app for a few years and yeah, people just assumed that you’re on Facebook. Which is funny, and, and they, they respond differently. They treat you almost with more deference like this person is thinking deeply.

So in the lab, we had a track of research around attention and focus and how that connects to getting into a state of flow and doing work, particularly difficult maker work. And one of the insights we had there was that the benefit of the information banquet, of course, is being able to go out and search Google Scholar and find every paper that’s ever been written on a subject or go on YouTube, or go down a Wikipedia rabbit trail and end up with 50 open tabs. That that’s a really powerful way to gather to collect information, but there’s sort of no bottom to that.

At some point we found that people need to draw a line around or draw a fence around a set of information and say, OK, I’m not going to go further than this. Now I want to take this set of sources, whether they’re papers, whether they’re websites, whether they’re tweets, whether they are excerpts, whether they’re photos they’ve captured on their phone, whatever that material is, and I’m gonna take this set. And I’m gonna treat that as a fixed set, and now I’m gonna look through that, read it, ponder on it, look for connections, look for patterns, and often that or second phase, I think we, we call it in some of the, in one of the papers that sort of second phase of rumination is best done, a little disconnected, a little removed. In fact, the ideal thing would even be going offline, going along train ride or something, and there’s just there’s no Wi Fi or what have you, um, and being able to do that. But the thing is you’re either all on or all. There’s no middle ground. You’re either in digital detox mode, your phone’s in airplane mode, you’re not using your devices effectively, or you’re fully connected. You’re on the internet. Basically almost all software nowadays requires internet connection to work properly. And so the idea, for example, being able to look through a set of web pages, uh, without an internet connection isn’t really very viable. So one of the things that that research and those insights fed into use was this idea that you’d be able to ingest things into this. Private, safe, sanctuary like space, know that anything you put in there is not dependent on an internet connection and then be able to take that set of things and then go someplace whether or not you’re connected. In fact, maybe it’s even better if you’re offline and be able to go through all of it and think about it and draw your conclusions and potentially use those conclusions in whatever work you’re going to do.

00:26:25 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I think that character of where you’re doing this deep thinking and rumination is really important. Especially now because the public wild internet is this incredibly frenetic, almost combative information space, you know, likes, retweets, refreshes, ads, notifications, uh, and, and the prospect that any of those could change or you could open a new app. It’s almost like you’re in fight or flight mode, right, when you’re out there on the wild internet, and I think it’s just psychologically really hard to relax so that your mind can do the deep background processing that it needs to um accomplish this rumination. So I think crafting the space, well that’s physical. digital or perhaps both that supports that work is really important.

00:27:03 - Speaker 1: You mentioned the technique of reading paper books as one way to manage this. Uh, we’ve also seen in kind of the ethnographic studies that printing stuff out is a technique that people use for that, so it’s the same kind of ideas as the book, which is, OK, I’ve got these, I’ve got a couple of papers, I’ve got this one website, and I’ve got a couple of screenshots and I’m gonna print all those things out and then be able to go and work in a paper workspace just on a desk or something like that. Uh, with this fixed set of things.

And of course it seems really funny to be printing out web pages and printing out screenshots, but in fact it is a good technique precisely because it is this fixed set because you’re not tempted to to go down the shiny objects path, tumble off that edge, and you can really stay focused on what’s in front of you.

00:27:49 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I think printing also relates to your physical space and posture. I know that some people print out stuff so they can read it at their desk, like the same place that they have their computer, but I know that when I like to do this rumination type work, I prefer to do it basically on a chair or a couch in a sort of semi reclined posture.

When I’m quickly gathering information on the go, that’s the phone, when I’m ruminating, doing deep thinking.

Developing ideas in something like Muse, I like to be sitting down in a soft chair, and when I’m doing like editing complex documents, I like to be sitting upright office chair at my computer and I found that those different physical postures are actually really important to encouraging the right type of creative thinking.

00:28:24 - Speaker 1: The other thing you get with printouts as well as the ability to put them in say 3D space, physical space. So often when you go to, I don’t know, an agency office or yeah, certainly an academic’s office or any anyone who does designers, for example, often pin up storyboards and screenshots, you know, annotated screenshots of an application that they’re working on. Obvious movie filmmaking folks tend to do kind of storyboards on the walls, but there’s something about not only being able to have that sort of tactile, uh. Experience and different posture like you said, but also the potential ability to put it around us in space and to have agency overdoing it.

00:29:02 - Speaker 2: I think this is another really important psychological state like you feel like you have agency over your information, your work, it’s really hard to invest your deepest creative energies when you feel like it could shift out from under you at any time or someone could take it away or could get, you know, refreshed or something, the physical printout or desktop style apps that are very stable. Give you that sense of agency over your work.

00:29:22 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think that agency element is a big part of why I still like files.

Uh mobile platforms have largely abstracted away files, and I think that’s basically for the best for certainly the the common case of the, yeah, consumer that has more limited needs in their computing life, but for the maker, for the creator that wants to build up their own personal archives over time.

Maybe I shouldn’t speak for others, but I’ll speak for myself, which is files have this very simple quality.

They seem very tangible, even though of course they’re they’re digital, but they’re, they have this, this timelessness and maybe it’s that they work across platforms, maybe it’s that they’ve they’ve been around a long time, but I feel like there’s more to it than that.

They have a they have a feel where I feel like, OK, if I’ve got the file, I’ve got it. I’ve really got it. Nothing’s gonna take it from me. It’s not gonna change out from underneath me.

There’s this, I guess there’s the ownership quality, but, but it really does feel like agency.

If I want to have two copies of the file, I can. If I want to delete the file and know that it’s fully gone, I can also do that files for all their challenges they maybe create in the computing world for people needing to, I don’t know what manage their hard drives when they’re not prepared for that. They do have a lot of qualities that I think are really promising.

00:30:32 - Speaker 2: I think that’s really important. I think this is an example of a case where that we’re going to find out in the order of 1020, 30 years that the approach that we’re taking to information management today has some big downsides.

Personal data, creative data that’s tied up with applications, especially applications that are like networked on the internet, uh, you can only load them remotely.

This is very brittle. It works great, you know, now you get this web app that you can load anywhere, but it’s really unlikely that the Data is going to be readable and accessible in 30 years, for example, whereas if you had a text file from 30 years ago, there’s a very good chance that you could have preserved it, and that would, that would be in your agency to do so. And so I think this is a trade-off that’s only going to become apparent as we get a few decades of experience with these tools. And and my bet is that files and file like data that’s independent from applications is going to be the right side of that bet.

00:31:17 - Speaker 1: this reminds me of something we talked about previously, which was. and um command line and that sort of thing and that particular paradigm and that particular way of interacting with my computer fell out of being so central and important for me because as the phone became more uh bigger part of my computing life, plain text is a great example of something where I’ve I’ve relied on that for a very long time and I I do love plain text, but increasingly as I find it’s hard to embed a link, it’s hard to emoji in there. I kind of want an image and you know, I kind of want bullet points. Those are a hassle and like increasingly the capabilities it has are not quite enough or not quite keeping pace with the modern world and so yeah, it’s always a trade-off there where at some at some point I go, well, plain text just doesn’t quite cut it for me anymore, but then yeah, we are in in making choosing to, I don’t know, jump into some. Some app that has all the modern sleek features, uh, then I also lose some of these qualities of timelessness, agency, data ownership.

00:32:20 - Speaker 2: And perhaps we can do a whole podcast at some point about our thinking there and how we’re trying to bridge those two worlds with Muse, but I think as it relates to the information age just this idea of retaining your data is really important. I think an unresolved question for our current set of network-based apps.

00:32:34 - Speaker 1: And maybe another piece of that. That is your data, so the concept of what your data even is, which is maybe a little bit like the drawing the fence around things that I mentioned earlier, but yeah, if I, if I write a paper, that’s obviously my work, but if I reference a paper someone else has written, if I download that paper, go through it in detail, mark it up with a bunch of highlights, well, I tend to think of those highlights as being my. And certainly my Kindle highlights, I think that way, even though they’re an annotation on someone else’s work. I think there is this threshold you cross or there is this better way to put it is that I think it would actually be a good idea or it is potentially an approach to living in this information age that could be helpful, particularly for knowledge workers is to have an idea of what’s mine and what’s the rest of the world’s.

So when I’m just scrolling through a Twitter feed, That’s the, the flow of the information world. It’s not mine in particular. I don’t even really want to keep it around. I would quickly my information systems would quickly get clogged if you try to track every single thing that you read, which by the way, is a is an idea that came up frequently when people were talking about this kind of Memex derived lines of research, which is why, why don’t I just save everything I’ve ever seen. And it turns out that people have written systems to do that and it quickly becomes unmanageable, not just in the sense of large data sets are unmanageable, but in the sense of it’s not useful to me when I do a search and I find what seems like a bunch of pretty irrelevant stuff because 98% of what you see, you don’t care about is not relevant, you’re just, you just keep on scrolling and having this moment where you decide to actively people use the word curate, but Draw something that’s that’s a little too, almost a little too high minded. It’s really just to say, I’m gonna take this paper and read it and that and and make a few highlights and that in a way makes it mine. Not the paper, but the the reading of it or the highlights of it or my personal understanding of it. Now it’s my And it should be in my information set, in my personal knowledge base, whatever that is, having a better concept of that.

And yeah, I think the the nature of kind of cloud and web applications and most mobile applications work this way too is you don’t really have a concept of that. I guess you have your account, but the reality is that what’s in your account is very Can shift very significantly depending on what the people the service decide, right?

00:34:58 - Speaker 2: And so even things that you’ve seen with your own eyes can be taken away from you.

A related situation here is how enterprise software is often managed. So again, I think a fundamental psychological thing for creative work is a sense of safety and privacy.

It’s a very vulnerable act to create something new, especially when it’s risky or uncertain.

I hypothesize that it’s harder to do that.

When you feel like someone may immediately own or have control or be able to see that work, I think you need a private personal space.

And I’ve always found that a little hard to do in classic enterprise software.

So for example, on Google Docs, if you have a Google Docs or for your company and you go to make a new document that’s only quote unquote visible by you, well, sort of, right? So anyone Google can see the document and really anyone at your company can see it.

You know, the administrators who own the company really own the document. It’s kind of your It’s like it’s your name on it, but not really yours.

And I think some people, that’s fine, they’re able to do their creative work like that. But I think other people, either explicitly or implicitly, have a really hard time putting their full heart into their work when they know that it’s not really theirs and who can see it when it isn’t really under their control.

I like the classic academic model. I come back to this analogy a lot, where you’re a professor and you’re doing creative work, and you have a personal private office, and the stuff that you write there on pen and paper is yours by default, um, but it’s still a very social thing. So you can elect to go out into the hallway and scribble some stuff on the whiteboard with colleagues or invite someone to come into your office and look at a work in progress, or you might have a big department meeting. But all of those actions are explicitly bringing your work into the group or taking the group into your work. It’s not that by default anything that you do is on a big, um, you know, whiteboard visible by everyone.

00:36:31 - Speaker 1: I think collaboration models is a huge area for potential innovation. We dipped just a even half a toe. of that in the the research lab.

I know you worked on uh on some projects that explored some of the decentralized collaboration models, not just the technology, but also, you know, what does it actually look like to potentially improve on the Google Docs model or the FIMA model which Which really hasn’t changed much since since sort of Google Docs first introduced it 15 years ago or whatever, but it’s a very, uh, there’s these very discreet jumps, which is, yeah, you’re either in the org, you’re in the company’s Google Docs account, or you’re in maybe your personal account. And then once you’re there, there’s maybe very specific work groups. I think we’ve seen the real world collaboration is much fuzzier than that.

GitHub does OK with this, I think to some degree with outside collaborators on repos, but it’s rarely that just you have a document or a set of project files or repo or whatever it is. In something like Figma, Google Docs notion that just everyone in your company should have full read and write access to.

And at the same time, you’re often collaborating with people outside the company, right? So there’s a project you’re working for these two people in the company, but then you’ve got this outside contractor who’s doing a few things, and you, you get these sort of shifting work groups, you know, the enterprise, guess it’s the enterprise model of control, but I think it’s also just Just a very simplified version of what work groups and collaboration looks like in practice.

And that’s an area I’d love to see much more innovation on come out the technology world.

00:38:05 - Speaker 2: Actually speaking of other people in collaboration, this leads me to another idea on the information age.

We said at the beginning that there’s this incredible abundance of information out there, almost like everything is online, and I feel like in some ways that’s true.

So you can see all of the I don’t know weather data from the US online presumably, but I think it’s important to realize that in a lot of cases, the stuff that’s online isn’t like proportional. The stuff that’s true or correct, for a lot of reasons, you know, in some cases, people are just confused, but in other cases, there’s there’s even perverse incentives for the wrong stuff to persist. Um, and I think something that becomes important in this inconsistent information age is deliberately and actively reading and processing the information and making decisions about who you’re going to follow on Twitter to get the better or right information and things like that.

00:38:48 - Speaker 1: Certainly, that makes me think about a lot of the recent discussions around social media platforms as arbiters of truth and the element of Perhaps once upon a time, or in the not too distant past, newspapers and journalists and other kinds of news outlets were in a way arbiters of truth.

You have journalistic ethics, which are all about trying to represent things fairly and focus on finding truth and that sort of thing.

And now, yeah, of course, the internet is this wild west where anyone can share an idea and that’s great in some ways, but it does mean that just because an idea is loud, uh, or because it’s it’s repeated often doesn’t necessarily make it true.

That doesn’t give it weight. That’s another thing.

Certainly our society is trying to grapple with is how to reckon with what is, what is truth and certainly what is a what is a shared understanding of our reality so that we can all make collective decisions together.

One group I’ve enjoyed following on that front is the Center for Humane Technology, and they’ve looked a lot at um they have some interesting manifesto type stuff on their website that I’ll link to in the podcast where they they talk a lot about this, the interaction of technology. These kind of individual choices we make about our information diet and that sort of thing and how we get the truth as individuals and as society and how we can hopefully change the technology but also our own individual habits to again get the best results for this both as an individual and a societal level.

00:40:11 - Speaker 2: You mentioned this idea of shared truth. I’m afraid it might be even trickier than we realize. I’m reminded of the so-called Gal man amnesia effect. This is when you’re reading a newspaper. Article in a subject of your personal expertise and you realize that the author doesn’t really know what they’re talking about. They’re making a lot of mistakes and so on. But at the same time, you turn the newspaper page, you read the article on some other topic that you’re not an expert on, and you say, oh, that’s you know the newspaper, they must know what they’re talking about, right? So let’s assume it’s true.

00:40:37 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I’ve I’ve I’ve had that experience multiple times. It is uncanny how you can immediately switch back to feeling like the news source of the journalistic sources and authority once it’s writing about something you’re not. Knowledgeable about, right?

00:40:50 - Speaker 2: And so I would go back and say, before the modern information age, when we just had broadcast media like print papers and cable, we didn’t really have a shared source of truth per se.

We had a shared source of like statements that we just didn’t have a better shared source to, you know, come to some agreement around, which is a sort of shelling point of quasi-truth that that’s the best we got, but with the modern information age, and especially social media, all of the individual citizens have the ability to analyze the different media that’s coming out, perhaps in their area of expertise and see the source.

Details and then go back on social media and say what they’re seeing, which might be that, you know, for example, I’m an expert on this topic and this newspaper doesn’t know what they’re talking about.

And this brings me back to a book called The Revolt of the Public, another one published by Straight Press, and the whole thesis here is that this is causing a big societal upheaval, because there’s no shared source of truth, especially around, you know, the classic political topics and the uh call them information elites, people like the newspaper editors are being revealed in this world to have less. Accuracy and authority than they might have been perceived to have previously and that’s causing all sorts of downstream issues and complications. And the way that I would tie that back to me in this podcast perhaps is that leaves individual citizens with a lot of responsibility for processing the information streams themselves and making their own decisions and conclusions. That’s a big thing that we try to support in the app is you bring this all this disparate information into your sanctuary, your information sanctuary, and then you have to make sense of that yourself.

00:42:11 - Speaker 1: Well, that strikes a chord with me because one thing that I strive to do in my life is be a good citizen, be a good member of society, be a good member of my neighborhood and communities that I’m part of.

And a lot of that is, I guess knowing stuff, and it’s not just being informed in the sense of, I don’t know, reading the newspaper or reading your community bullet. It’s knowing the stuff that matters and is relevant to the society you’re living in. And so that means both subscribing to those feeds, whatever form they might. They might come in, but then be able to pick out the parts that matter and then think through the parts that matter.

Yeah, so one thing that I try to do with my information tools is to have a space where I can pull in things that are relevant so that I can be informed so that I can think it through, so that I can understand the issues at hand for me and for my neighborhood and my society and hopefully be able to be a good citizen and there’s too much. Any one person to pay attention to or know uh in this information age, information banquet, fire hose, overload thing that we all face, but I think our information tools, if we chose them well and we use them in the right way, can be a big help there.

00:43:23 - Speaker 2: Well, that seems like a good place to wrap it. If any of our listeners out there have feedback, feel free to reach out to us at museA HQ on Twitter or hello at useapp.com via email. We always love to hear your comments and ideas for future episodes, and in this case, we’d love to hear if you have a way for managing your personal information stream.

00:43:43 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I’d love to hear folks' techniques, the tools they use, approaches, tricks, hacks, and general principles for having a healthy information diet, particularly how that connects to your work as a creative professional, because we’re really only at the start of this information age and I think we can all help and support each other as we try to make our way into this brave new world.