In 2007, the tide will turn, saving humankind from drowning in diversions.
At the point of being overwhelmed by repeated shotgun blasts of infobits, people will turn the gun around and hunt down what they want.
We’ll be able to select what mail, email, television programs, phone calls, and reports we want in our lives. We’re accustomed to taking whatever’s delivered; in the future, we’ll take what we choose. Media, software, training, and telephones will give us the ability to filter what gets past our personal firewalls.
People will rely on systems and on other people for guidance in selecting what they want in this self-service environment.
As for systems, Wayne Hodgins hit the nail on the head at Learning 2006, telling us that we need to be able to rate everything we read, to guide future readers. Del.icio.us enables you to pick your reading by popularity, date, or who’s shoulder you want to gaze over.
Human editors are vital, too. RSS may be a cool way to plough through information faster, but there are more interesting RSS feeds out there than anyone could even skim. David Weinberger, Jon Udell, Tom Stewart, Irving Wladawsky-Berger, Esther Dyson, Stephen Downes, Robin Good, and others I trust are my guides to what’s worth looking into.
I’m not predicting that pull will replace push everywhere we get information, just that the balance will shift more toward the pull end of the spectrum than the push.
2007
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Pull is good up to a point, but I suspect the really useful stuff, the key discoveries will continue to come from the edges and beyond, from outside your strong links, from the periphery.
What will be key is maintaining a fine balance between self-driven inquiry, network recommendations, individual foraging, deep ‘listening’, awareness and critical review.
If we just follow ‘Digg’ scores and the red hues in Del.icio.us, we pass opportunity by.
But aren’t “self-driven inquiry, network recommendations, individual foraging, deep ‘listening’, awareness and critical review” options we can select. I’ll sometimes throw myself into something just to see how I deal with the challenge. The motivation is pull. Or am I just asking to be pushed?