Article
Tagging anxiety
One of the books I read this summer is Information Anxiety 2, by Richard Saul Wurman. From the cover:
[This volume] gives clarity to confusion with new maps for navigation through a stream of bytes which leave us inundated with data but starved for the tools and patterns that give them meaning. In reality there has not been an information explosion, but rather an explosion of non-information, or stuff that simply doesn’t inform.
Information anxiety is different than the “information overload” we often hear about. Overload comes from sheer volume, anxiety comes from a feeling that you ought to be or need to be processing all the information that is available.
Consider this: You’re at a party (or at work, or at a concert, or anywhere) and you hear people talking about something you don’t know about. It’s a movie or an album or a news story or a gadget — but you missed out on it.
After repeated experiences like this, you begin to feel information anxiety. You’ll make sure to read the news every day — even though little of it really matters, you want to know “what’s going on in the world.” You’ll follow pop culture, so you feel comfortable at parties. This sounds desperate and sad, but it happens to everyone. Every day.
Prosumers
The web is changing from a mass of consumers to an active crowd of prosumers.
Nowadays, hardly anyone is just a consumer of content on the web. Whether in the form of blog posts, comments, reviews, or even simple rankings, almost everyone contributes in some way. Like Kevin Kelly says, we’re building a massively intelligent machine on the web (the machine is the web). Human-supplied connections — links, comments, rankings, taggings — are the synapses in our new collective brain.
Tagging anxiety
Lately, I’ve begun to feel a new type of information anxiety in my life. I’ve been calling it tagging anxiety, but it could just as easily be called prosumer anxiety or blogger anxiety. Or maybe, to borrow Wurman’s naming convention, it’s Information Anxiety 3.
It’s not about consuming information; it’s about creating it.
- Every time I save a link in del.icio.us and tag it, I worry — “What if I don’t tag it right? Will I ever find it again?”
- Every time I let a hot topic go without writing a blog post or leaving a comment, I worry — “Will the discussion be forever incomplete without my contribution?”
- Every time I take a picture and don’t add it to my Flickr stream, I worry — “Will I be able to find this picture in 3, 5 or 10 years?”
A prosumer-powered future
This post is starting to make me look paranoid and neurotic. I assure you that’s not the case :-)
But there is a grain of concern in what I say. As the contributions of a million monkeys become increasingly central to the web and to society — and as the rise of amateurs continues unabated — we need to look out for ourselves by creating tools and processes that facilitate and simplify this process.
Prosumers and their non-professional contributions will help to shape our information space, adding to the richness that is already far beyond anyone’s wildest dreams.
But we won’t get there (wherever “there” is) in one piece if the precious prosumers burn out along the way.