Keeping Found Things Found By, William Jones EXCERPTS
Chapter 7 Information flows from us and to us. We manage flow to protect our time, our attention, our money, . . . ourselves. Who sees what information when? What information, from whom, gets our time and attention? We're easily pushed and pulled by individual informational events. If the television is on, we'll watch. If the phone rings, we'll answer. Managing flow means focusing on channels of information and not individual events. We manage information not just to protect, but to project. We manage not just for privacy, but for power. ?he closing of a door can bring blessed privacy and comfort the opening, terror. Conversely, the closing of a door can be a sad and final thing the opening a wonderfully joyous moment.?/b> 7.1. Starting out Bob was late to his appointment last week to see a specialist about an apparent heart palpitation. Bob was also a week late in paying the monthly bill on one of his credit cards. And late the month before, too. Bob and his wife Carol sold their old house for $349,000 in April and purchased the house they currently live in that same month for $449,000. They are currently re-modeling the kitchen. Their three children Christopher, aged 10, Molly, aged 8, and Sidney, aged 6, all attend the elementary school a half mile from their house. What do these private facts about Bob, Carol and their children have in common? They are all, to different degrees, a matter of public record. Bob's visit to the specialist, the outcome of the visit and even the fact that Bob was late (and seemed ?lightly agitated? are part of a report that the specialist sent back to Bob's primary care physician and that is now a part of Bob's medical record. Information about Bob's tardiness in paying his credit card bill is kept by the credit card company. Bob's pattern of being late in payments is a part of his credit history and possibly available to banks and lending institutions for inspection should Bob ever apply for a loan. Information about the sale of Bob and Carol's old house and their purchase of their current house is maintained by the government of the county in which they reside and is available on-line via the Web. Bob's story is not unique. Technologies of storage and search enable others government agencies, private companies, authorized parties and unauthorized parties to keep large amounts of data about each of us in readily searchable, accessible, combinable forms. As noted in Chapter 6, technologies of keeping (e.g., supporting data capture, supporting ever cheaper, larger capacity, smaller-sized storage devices) and of finding (searching, indexing, faster access times, etc.) have outpaced technologies and procedures for properly maintaining the data stored and insuring its integrity. As a result, even a simple update of a person's email address, phone number or marital status becomes extremely problematic. Bob is receiving email, for example, on an old email account that he had hoped to decommission two years ago. This chapter is about privacy and, more generally, about the flow of information. How can we control the flow of our personal information and also personally relevant information to our best advantage? For personal information as kept and maintained by others, we seek control over who sees what and when (and under which circumstances). We don't want our tax records ?lowing to telemarketers, for example. But often the best way to control information about us ?ut there is to keep it from getting there in the first place. This chapter is also about the constant flow of information directed towards us. People stop by our office at work. Telemarketers call us during the dinner hour. The dryer beeps loudly to tell us the cycle has ended. Alerts on our computers tell us of new email, new updates, the restoration of a lost connection and other information that distracts us from and is not relevant to our current task. This too is a flow of information directed in towards us. The in-flow of information, in many forms, must also be controlled if we're to keep our concentration, our productivity, our precious time with our family, our solitude and our sanity. Consider some more examples of flow involving Bob:
Each scenario involves flow. Information flows from us. Information flows towards us. And sometimes we're in a ?low with concentrated time to complete a task and all the needed information at hand. The management of privacy and information flow is explored in this chapter through discussion that moves through the following sections:
7.2 Getting oriented The previous two chapters have talked about the meta-level activities of organization and maintenance as an extension to the keeping of information. This chapter is about the management of privacy and the flow of information. This too is a meta-level activity in both the ?bove/about and ?fter senses of ?eta?
Table 7 1. Issues of privacy and flow arise for each kind of personal information.
Concerns of privacy bring us back to the several senses of ?ersonal described in Chapter 2 and summarized here in Table 7 1.
?'ve never looked through a keyhole without finding someone was looking back.?/b> Note that #6 information we will (will want to, will not want to) experience -- is in opposition to #5 information we have already experienced.2 After we've experienced the information, it reverts to sense #5 of the personal. We can't ?n-experience it. The issues change. If the information is useful, we might want later to return to the information again. Search support both for filtering out or in new information and for re-finding information already experienced is explored in more detail in Chapter 11. Issues of privacy that relate to #5 have to do with the record of what we've experienced. This record, separate from the information itself, is a kind of private information and we may want to control who has access to this information. One important aspect of #4 -- information sent (or posted) by us is the email we send and this is discussed in greater detail in Chapter 10. Remaining sections in this chapter focus primarily on control over two other senses of personal information information about us (sense #2) and information directed towards us (sense #3). Discussion is cast in terms of managing flow managing outflow and managing inflow. Again, aside from legislation, we can't stop other people (companies, advertisers, the faceless senders of junk email) from directing information our way. Our main control is over what gets in to grab our time and attention. Similarly, leaving aside legislation, the best way to control the information that others have about us is to keep them from getting this information in the first place.
An ancient belief has it that a ringing in our ears means someone is talking about us.3 If the belief is true then perhaps the ringing we hear in our ears is not a result of tinnitus or some inflammation of our ears. At any point in time, we could be the subject of discussion as various people and organizations collect and exchange information about us. With each email we send, with each item we buy, with each web page we view, possibly with every step we take, we potentially provide information about ourselves that can be used by others. Living, even living as a reclusive shut-in, provides information to others. This fact is not new, as anyone in a small town can attest. What is new is the extent to which information about us about the ?mpression we make on the world around us is recorded in digital forms that can be stored, transmitted and then later retrieved by nearly anyone, anywhere at any time. Our digital information age has brought several profound changes that impact our privacy:
One comment I sometimes hear in discussions of PIM and privacy is that young people seem not to care much about privacy. The conclusion is sometimes reached that a generational shift has taken us to a point where issues of privacy matter less than they used to. Perhaps the young are merely the first to accept Scott McNealy's dictate that ?ou have zero privacy anyway?a name="4p">Get over it.?sup>4 But there are reasons to believe youthful nonchalance concerning matters of privacy will fade when age brings careers, families and reputations that might suffer or even be lost through the revelations of youthful acts. Even if we understand our acts to be those of a distant self we barely recognize, others may still attribute these actions to us. Michael Shamos, an attorney specializing in matters of personal privacy provides an example from his own life that illustrates the points above and the ways in which large quantities of information kept in digital form profoundly alter the privacy landscape. A Web-accessible database is kept by the government of the county in which he residesresides5 that contains information about houses and other buildings in the county: ?ou'll learn my wife's name, how much we paid for the house, its assessed value, how many bathrooms it has, that we have central heating and air conditioning, how much we pay in real estate taxes, whether we were ever delinquent in paying, how much we were assessed in penalties, and a lot more data you didn't imagine the county even knew. You will also be treated to a photo of my house and its floor plan. (Shamos in press) The county provides the information as a public service with many legitimate uses. In particular, people can view the database to judge the fairness of their property assessment. But this public disclosure of personal information can be used in bad ways, too. Thieves planning a break-in would find it very useful to know the layout of the house and of neighboring houses as well. Knowing that a particular house doesn't yet have central air conditioning could certainly provide a useful cover should a concerned neighbor discover the would-be thieves and ask what their intentions are (?e're here to install central air conditioning ?).
Once personal information is out, it's out ?he genie out of the bottle? There is very little we can do to control or even correct the information that others have about us. To the extent that we have any control at all it is usually in deciding what information gets out in the first place. One policy is to let out as little information as possible. But this is not a practical solution for most of us. Some distribution of personal information can be very useful. Alan Westin noted that ?ach individual is continually engaged in a personal adjustment process in which he balances the desire for privacy with the desire for disclosure and communication of himself to others, (Westin 1967, p7). Grudin notes, for example, that ?espite well-circulated accounts of the extensive collection, aggregation, and interpretation of credit and debit card transactions to identify purchasing patterns, people would rather use them than make the effort to carry cash (p 279). In general, people accept some risk in disclosure for compensating benefits. It is now common for people in an organizational setting to provide at least a busy/free level of access to their calendar information. There are risks of even this rough level of disclosure a workplace enemy might use this information to plan an office ?oup? But people consider these risks to be more than offset by the advantages of disclosure including much greater ease in scheduling meetings (Palen 1999). A Harris Poll conducted in 2003 (Taylor 2003) divided the 1010 adults who responded into three categories based upon their privacy concerns: 1. ?rivacy fundamentalists (24%) are strongly resistant to any further erosion in their privacy. 2. ?rivacy unconcerned (10%) have no strong concerns about privacy. 3. The large middle ground (64%) was occupied by ?rivacy pragmatists? Privacy pragmatists feel strongly about the protection of their privacy against abuses or unauthorized uses of their personal information. But they are also willing to share their information with others when the apparent benefits outweigh the risks.
Regardless of what we mean to do in order to protect our privacy and security, we're often drawn into situations where we must (quickly) make decisions impacting our privacy and security without clearly understanding of the implications of the decisions being made. How many of us click ?o to the questions posed in either dialog of Figure 7 1? And yet, how many of us really understand the implications of clicking ?es? Or, similarly, how many of us carefully read the terms of an on-line agreement (for a download, for example) before checking ? Accept and clicking ?ontinue? The problem now is that we often have little choice between ?es and ?o and lack the time to decide even between these two alternatives.
Figure 7 1. How many of us click "No" to either dialog?
Certainly we need to avoid phishers (see sidebar) who try to con us into providing sensitive information such as credit card number or account number and password under the guise of being a provider with a legitimate need for such information. But, all too easily, we can be drawn into dialogs with legitimate providers where we wind up providing information we would prefer to keep private. Do we faithfully enter our home, work and mobile phone numbers into a form when none of these is logically needed for completion of the transaction? Or, where forms insist on some non-null entry, do we think to satisfy the form by filling in a single number such as a main reception number for our office for all three questions?
We may need to decide, case by case, what information to provide to whom and when. But that doesn't mean we should have to decide alone or without assistance. We can benefit from help to:
P3P (standing for Platform for Privacy Preferences Project) is a World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)-sponsored initiative aimed at support of a common language for representation of privacy preferences and policy. P3P provides for the expression of personal privacy preferences and web site privacy policies in a comparable XML format, as well as mechanisms for locating and transporting these expressions.
Once upon a time, a group of students working on their PhDs at Carnegie-Mellon University would gather together every Saturday morning for breakfast at a little hole-in-the-wall diner in Pittsburgh called Ernie's. I was one of them. We ate pancakes and eggs and had great conversations. Breakfast at Ernie's was active entertainment. Everyone played. Each of us, in our turn, said something funny or silly or though-provoking. Then one day a television appeared, mounted high up near the ceiling on the wall. It was always on. Our breakfast at Ernie's changed forevermore. We gaped helplessly at the television even as we observed ourselves doing so. The harder we tried not to look, the more we looked. Conversation happened only in fits and starts, engaging only some of us whiles others attended, openly or surreptitiously, to the television. We stopped going to Ernie's. Over twenty years ago, Ries and Trout in their book ?ositioning: The battle for your mind described an ?ssault on the mind brought about by a revolution in modern communication that ?as so jammed our channels that only a fraction of all messages get through. And not the most important ones either. (Ries and Trout 1986, p11). The battle for our attention has only increased in intensity since these observations were made. There is now an active area of discussion the ?ttention economy and ?ttention economics.?sup>6 As human beings, we are wired to attend to the ring of a phone, the appearance of a new email alert or the blare of a television set. We can't easily change our nature. What we can do is to adjust the flows of information in our environment in order to create spaces and times in which we are relatively protected from these informational intrusions. Control over the inflow as well as the outflow of information is essential if we're to protect our privacy. This section explores additional reasons for the importance of the management of inflow. 7.3.1. Attention capture We often get distracted by sights and sounds that have nothing to do with the task at hand. Psychologists call this attention capture (Folk and Gibson 2001). We're especially wired to attend to movement and ?ooming on the periphery of our vision. Certainly sensitivity to change had survival value for our ancestors who were threatened by the warriors of a hostile tribe or by predatory animals (for whom our ancestors were targeted as actual meat, not just the ?oney, energy, attention, time of an information assault). Sensitivity to movement and looming has value even today as a way to alert us to the danger of an oncoming car or a mugger. People working in the media, in general, and advertisers, in particular, have been very adept at developing devices for exploiting these sensitivities in order to grab our attention and keep it. Consider television. There has been a marked increase in camera cuts where a camera cut is defined to be ?ransition to a different camera perspective that results in the depiction of a new visual environment or entirely new visual information (Southwell and Lee 2004, p 655). In an analysis of Dutch episodes of Seasame Street between 1977 and 2003, for example, Koolstra, van Zanten, Lucassen, & Ishaak (Koolstra, van Zanten et al. 2004) found that the mean number of camera cuts per minute doubled between 1977 and 2003 from four to eight. MacLachlan and Logan (MacLachlan and Logan 1993) found the number of camera cuts per minute to be especially high on programs and channels targeting a teen and twenty-something market, such as on MTV. Their analysis of camera shot lengths the time between camera cuts showed a steady decline in shot length between 1978 and 1991. For example, shot length on a 30-second commercial declined from 3.8 seconds in 1978 to 2.3 seconds in 1991. On average shot lengths for commercials were 50% or less than the shot lengths of the programs in which these commercials occurred. The high number of camera cuts and the corresponding shortness of camera shots have the affect of keeping us glued to the television set. We may find it difficult not to attend even when the volume is muted. Some studies suggest that we're more likely to attend to an old object that moves than a new object that doesn't move (Franconeri, Hollingworth et al. 2005). This raises the possibility that the attention we pay may not always align with our expectations concerning information value. We may, for example, be more likely to attend to the blinking advertisement of a web page even the same advertisement that was there the last time we visited the web site than a new hyperlink possibly pointing to useful information. Data also suggest that we may be nearing a breakdown in our ability to apprehend the message in a video segment that is laced with camera cuts. MacLachlan and Logan present data suggesting that as the length of a camera shot goes below a certain length (2.5 seconds in their study) the memorability and impact of the commercial also declines . Also Lang, Zhou, Shwartz, Bolls, & Potter (2000) found less memorability for short shot length (and more camera cuts). In a worst of both worlds, then, we may sit in rapt stupefied attention and then recall nothing later. 7.3.2. The availability heuristic Research in human cognition provides a second effect, called the availability heuristic, which is also of direct relevance to a discussion of inflows and the management of personal information. The term was coined by Tversky and Kahneman (Tversky and Kahneman 1973; Tversky and Kahneman 1974) to describe a human tendency to estimate ?requency or probability by the ease with which instances or associations could be brought to mind. (Tversky and Kahneman 1973, p. 171) To illustrate the effect, let's imagine a person named Tom who is running for office in a small local election a position, say, on the city council. Tom wants to know the likely percentage of people that will vote for him but he lacks the money to commission a poll. He decides, instead, to trust his own ?ut estimate that he is doing really well so well in fact that he decides to take a vacation rather than campaign during the final week before the election. Tom loses by a landslide. What happened? He was so sure he would win! Tom's problem is that he based his estimates on the people he met personally who said ?e're going to vote for you or some similar expressions of support. Tom is much more likely to meet supporters than not. The people who didn't plan to vote for him weren't at his campaign rallies. We are frequently in situations like Tom's. We must estimate likelihoods. ?f I go this way to work, what are the chances I'll be late because of a traffic jam? ?hat are the chances that so and so will finish the project on time? ?o I need to take my umbrella? (What are the chances for rain?) For some decisions, like the chances of rain, we can consult the newspaper or the Web. For many other decisions, we base estimates of likelihood on a sampling of information readily at hand information we can recall from memory or information we can readily apprehend from the hot regions of our PSI the headlines of today's newspaper, the papers on our desktop, or the email messages still listed in view on our screen. What else, after all, are we to do? Decisions requiring some estimates of likelihood come up many times in a typical day. We certainly can't hire a pollster or statistician each time we need to decide something! But what we can do is to be aware of the ways in which our use of the availability heuristic biases our estimates (even our perceptions) of reality and of the decisions based upon these estimates. Which is more frequent in the English language: 1. Words that begin with the letter ? or 2: words that have a ? as in the third position? If you answered with the first alternative you are in good company with a large and statistically significant majority of subjects in a Tversky and Kahneman experiment (Tversky and Kahneman 1973) In fact, a typical English-language text contains roughly twice as many words with a ? in the third position as in the lead position. The explanation for our mistakes in estimation is that we're able to recall many more words that begin with a ? than words that contain a ? in the third position. Our memories for words are indexed by lead letter, not by embedded letters. Mistakes in the estimation of word frequencies is not likely to cause most of us trouble. But the use of the availability heuristic, with its reliance on the memorability of events, can lead to systematic biases in our decision-making with real-world impact. Tversky and Kahneman notes that ?ontinued preoccupation with an outcome may increase its availability, and hence its perceived likelihood. People are preoccupied with highly desirable outcomes, such as winning the sweepstakes, or with highly undesirable outcomes, such as an airplane crash. (p. 230). The media tendency to focus on sensational events has been linked to a tendency for people to overestimate the likelihood of these events (Combs and Slovic 1979). Sensational events such as terrorist attacks, incidents of road rage or molestations by pedophile priests actually get a double boost in availability: 1. We are more likely to hear of them through media coverage (than, for example, the many more frequent deaths that result from disease). 2. The lurid nature of the events covered means we are more likely to remember these events later on. Efforts to counter the biases of the availability heuristic are multi-pronged.
Some of us have seen the classic ? love Lucy episode called ?ob Switching (but often simply referred to as the ?andy Factory episode?. Lucy is trying to manage in her new job as a worker on a candy factory assembly line. The candy comes down the line. Lucy carefully wraps each individual piece. So far so good. But then the flow increases. More pieces of candy go down the line. At first Lucy tries to go faster too. The individual pieces are not wrapped as carefully but they're still wrapped. But when the flow of candies goes still faster the situation turns chaotic. Lucy stuffs candies in her mouth and in her blouse when she can not keep up. Even so, unwrapped candies flow by and out the other end. If we move beyond the slapstick hilarity of the episode, we can easily relate Lucy's situation to many we face in our own efforts at personal information management. Information comes in. And then more information And then still more information. The email messages that arrive on the first day of our job may be answered with care. As more email messages arrive, our responses become briefer. And as the flow of email increases still further, we may begin to ignore or overlook email messages altogether. E-mail for many of us certainly seems to be a prime example of information overload. The term is itself overloaded with meaning. Information overload is sometimes equated with the exponential growth in the amount of available information. But an explosion in the world's supply of information needn't cause us personal stress unless we're a ?enaissance scholar hoping to keep pace with it all. Scholars dropped any pretense of doing this well before the onset of the Renaissance. Kirsh (Kirsh 2000) suggests another sense of overload related to the notion that, while the amount of available information is rising exponentially, the supply of ?uality information is growing only linearly. This Malthusian relationship is leading to a steady decline in the density of quality information. But again, this needn't be cause of personal distress, either because we're blissfully ignorant of the information we're missing or because we've found effective ways of locating the needle in the haystack (e.g. through use of search tools). Information overload becomes personally distressing when our personal systems for managing information begin to breakdown. As discussed in Chapter 5, signs of breakdown are evident in ever-increasing mounds of paper documents waiting to be filed according to a system that seemed great when we thought it up but now takes too much time in practice to maintain. Signs of breakdown are evident in a sense of having lost control over the files of a computer desktop or the email messages in the inbox. People also experience information overload when they begin to fall behind in their plans for handling incoming information relating to a project or a decision to be made. Perhaps the information is in the form of paper job applications awaiting review for a position to be filled. Or perhaps the information relates to alternatives in the purchase of a new computer or digital camera. Up to a point, people continue to master the material though perhaps by taking shortcuts as flow increases skimming rather than reading in depth, for example. But as a certain point is reached, the whole process begins to break down and the degradation in a person's ability to keep up is far from graceful.
There are no easy, certain solutions to this personal breakdown in the processing of decision or project-related information. But here are some approaches to consider:
Likewise, we can't avoid using the availability heuristic. In many situations we have few other alternatives. However, we can try to select our channels of incoming information so that the information ?vailable gives a more balanced representation of the likelihoods we need to estimate. Finally, with information overload discussed here as a breakdown in our ability to keep pace with incoming information focus needs to shift to the channel of incoming information and to overall strategies for its processing. Do we satisfice, triage or sample? This is a choice of strategy involving a consideration for the channel of information (or set of alternatives) as a whole. ?hen I am . . . traveling in a carriage, or walking after a good meal, or during the night when I cannot sleep; it is on such occasions that ideas flow best and most abundantly.?/b>
We have all, it is to be hoped, had occasional moments of supreme concentration and productivity where we feel as if we're working at a higher level as a super version of the person we normally are. No only do we get a great deal done but the quality of our work may be better, too. Even better, moments like these often referred to as being ?n the flow or ?n the zone are also restful and fun even blissful. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (Csikszentmihalyi 1991) writes: It does not seem to be true that work necessarily needs to be unpleasant. It may always have to be hard, or at least harder than doing nothing at all. But there is ample evidence that work can be enjoyable, and that indeed, it is often the most enjoyable part of life. Csikszentmihalyi identifies several characteristics of being in the flow:
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