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"Removing the faults in a stage-coach may produce a perfect stage-coach, but it is unlikely to produce the first motor car." - Edward de bono
The Publishers, Studios and Record Labels (PSL) belong to the Era of Information Scarcity. With the Great Flood of Information, the PSLs are starting to disappear. We are at the cusp of a filter inversion, from the Talent to Attention.
But, we cannot design the attention filter by perfecting the Talent Filter. The Google Reader is one such improved Stagecoach.
The Attention Filter needs to be instrumented taking into account the following:
1. Technology alone is capable of providing dynamic affordances to readily access content from an astounding variety of Sources. Google Reader currently provides a static affordance to access content. The dynamicity is upto the Reader.
2. Such Content comes from varying degrees of fidelity and Creating context for the content becomes indespensible to consuming content.
3. Context creation is still a Human Endeavor, in spite of tremendous advancements in Technology.This fact was realized and is leading to the surge of social "connected consumption" tools like Friendfeed.
4. Technology could be used to collect and correlate consumer's attention and reputation data, without compromising on Consumer Privacy.There exists a fine balance between monetization and privacy in the "Social Networking" world, where the Facebooks and other socnets of the world are struggling to get a handle of.
I think Social Interaction is very entertaining and enriching yet unnecessary for connected consumption. Technology could beautifully connect this vast connected intelligence, into a personalized kaleidoscope.
So, instead of the Morning Newspaper, you would rely on this attention filter in providing you continuity of experience and consistency. .... in providing the 6 things from the 6,586,433 things, that you care about.
Whenever you go to a typical American Supermarket, you deal with 40,000 choices for purchasing 18 items. According to Kevin Kelly, on an average you complete Shopping in 20 minutes.
On one hand, it is an incredible feat. But, on the other, not so much. Constraints lead to simpler decision-making.
Your Physical capacity to bring back the goods and Money acts as hard constraints. ...and the social rituals of having different categories of meals, such as breakfast, lunch,etc., constraints the type of food that you would need and acts as one of the many soft constraints. All these constraints bring a beautiful structure, in reducing this magical feat into a pedestrian ritual.
Constraint is not neccessarily bad. The biggest constraint of all,Gravity, makes life possible.
It is not the same case when we consume digital goods from the internet. We live in the Age of Free. Our cognition though limited, is stretched due to the mojo of the internet.
There are millions of pages to chose from. The only artificial constraint that you have today is the Search Term.
Facebook and our Friends in real life, shepherd us in some artificial direction. Yet, the magical mojo of the Internet, make us go astray, like Mary's little Lamb. We tend to spend more time, shopping for digital content, than actually consuming.
Wish somebody figures out how to harness this connected intelligence into a beautiful order, using Technology and to make consumption in the internet more joyful... that we spend more time consuming and help us break away from this perpetual search mindset.
Social Networks come in a variety of shapes and forms. They provide a culture of "Synthetic closeness" (this is a term coined by a caller in an NPR Program).
Yet, if I want to use these socnets for the sole purpose of "connected consumption", it begins to break down,like the Google Reader does.
Google Reader works extremely well initially, with a small set of feeds. With power usage, as you add more things into your Reader, you would soon be inundated by the Stream of Contents. You learn to treat content,not as though, it is from an inbox, but as a stream.
Yet, you need to constantly forage to manage,what gets into the curated stream. This is where, the Friendfeeds of the world, come in. You could pretty much share your digital consumption portfolio, to your friends, by asking friendfeed, to pull content from a variety of sources from delicious bookmarks, to youtube favorites and the movies in Netflix.
So, you no longer have to tweet or Facebook Feed, whatever you consume in the internet, Friendfeed pulls it for you. This is an awesome affordance, if you want to share as well as easily consume what your friends consume.
Yet, the Quality of the curation stream is still limited by your "friending" ability. Friendfeed and its digital cousins, remove the "foraging ability" limitation and replace it with your limitation of "friendability".
Connected Consumption need not be and is not about socialization. In fact, Connected Consumption is not about socnets, but about "Curator Pools".
Curator Pools are powered by Algorithms that "naturally select" invisible curators dynamically for you, based on your consumption and reputation history.
