Knock, Knock: Information Pollution Is Here

CowboyRobot writes ""Information Pollution" is one of the newer buzz-phrases, appearing in various media to describe unwanted phone calls, faxes, emails, etc. Jakob Nielsen, known for his critiques of user interfaces has an article about the problems of unwanted instant messaging interruptions. Nielsen is respectable not only because of the clarity of his arguments but because he also cites empirical evidence, rather than just complaining. In the article he describes the current problem, then proposes a 'control panel' as a centralized interface to manage all the communications one would make via the computer."

Comments

really...

[User 956]

Nielsen is respectable not only because of the clarity of his arguments but because he also cites empirical evidence, rather than just complaining.

I hate to sound like I'm just bashing the guy, but he's a huge hypocrite. I started reading his site back in the day, and after signing up, I got spam for years afterwards.

"Information Pollution" my ass. Up until he decides something's bad and coins some clever term, he'll do it with no compunction.

With all the spam ...

[gulfan]

With all the spam on the Internet these days I find it harder and harder to find information on what I want. I was searching for information on teens in general for a project that my company was working on and majority of the results were adult related. When searching for products such as Cell Phones I'll be shown thousands of results for Antenna Boosters, Free unlocking Kits and more. Is anyone else having the same problems?

And this helps how?

[stubear]

'...then proposes a 'control panel' as a centralized interface to manage all the communications one would make via the computer."'

What are the options? Drop nuke on spammer's house? Send in the black helicopters? The problem isn't so much on the receiver's end as it on the sender's end. Instead of forcing users to jump through flaming hoop after flaming hoop why don't we develop systems that make it more difficult to send spam in the first place? Jakob Neilsen, of all people, should know better than to suggest such a wasteful UI to solve a much deeper problem with the system itself. If you want total anonymity on the internet than you have to deal with these problems. You can't say only certain peolpe get to be anonymous and the people I don't like can't. You want to be able to spoof headers? Be prepared for spammers to take advantage of this "feature". You want to have the ability to have open relays? Get ready for the flood of spam that will use them.

This Was A Big Problem For Me

[gurustu]

So I solved it by setting up two separate computers. One's my "work box" with my editors, shells, DB clients, etc. The other is my "communications box" with my email client, IM client, calendar, IRC clients, etc. Once I turned off all the alarms/alerts on the latter (except for the calendar), and once I made it so that I couldn't see the latter except by switching over to that box, my efficiency (and job satisfaction) skyrocketed.

Initially, it made me less available and less responsive, and that bothered me. However, my work habits started to change in response to it. Because I now control my exposure to communications, I find that I can flip to the other box, scan for messages, and flip back to my work box without exiting the flow state.

This has had some other really positive side effects. For example, people are aware that I'm in my office, even if I'm not responding to IM. That means that if something's really important, they'll often just drop by, replacing the thirty back-and-forth email with a simple 5 minute conversation. Sure, I lose my flow state, but high priority problems bubble up to the top of the list and get resolved in the most effective way (ie; face to face) possible.

Re:This Was A Big Problem For Me

[sapped]

This has had some other really positive side effects. For example, people are aware that I'm in my office, even if I'm not responding to IM. That means that if something's really important, they'll often just drop by, replacing the thirty back-and-forth email with a simple 5 minute conversation.

This is great if you are in a position to do so. On my last project we had 3 management types who "communicated" with us continuously on such useful topics such as "File time sheets by 4pm". Yeah, like that was worth breaking my concentration! However, I tried to combat this problem first by talking to them about it and then later by simply not logging onto the company IM system anymore when I needed to concentrate. This was rewarded with a public reprimand branding me as combatitive and I was told I had to be logged into the IM and be available to management at all times otherwise they would refuse to sign off on my billing.

Needless to say the useless twits "managed" themselves and us out of jobs when their constant nitpicking eventually killed the project. 3 years working with a 45+ team in four countries and not a thing to show for it today. Go you wonderful corporate giant!

Your polluting yourself with information

[Fnkmaster]

I don't get this. People bring much of this interruptedness upon themselves. Ya know what, when I don't want to get cell phone calls, I turn off my cell phone or just turn off the ringer and don't answer it. I will check my messages when I feel like it and get back to somebody when I get a chance. Email, polluted as it is by spam, is by design a non-interruptive form of communication. Sure, I'm as addicted as the next guy - but if I have work to do or I'm focused on something intently, I'll go 3, 4 hours without checking my email.

IM is no different. It's just that IM is by design an interruptive form of communication. This just makes it all the more important that you don't leave it on all day long like many people do. If you leave your IM client on and complain that people keep interrupting you, I have no sympathy. There are some companies these days that seem to think using IM for work is a good idea. If somebody in the office wants to get in touch with you, they should walk over to your cube, or call you on your office phone. If it's not important enough for that, then an email is a better idea.

Check your email once every few hours, no more. If you must more often, for work, at least try to reeducate people - don't reply to emails immediately, train them to use more direct forms of communication when they need an immediate reply. Only turn on your IM client in the evenings when you don't expect to do productive work, and are just surfing the web. Learn to turn off your cell phone, and make sure the people you work with understand the rules for contacting you outside of work hours - leave a message, you'll get back to them. Be in control of your life and your time, you don't need some magic technotool, just a little self-restraint and discipline.

Quality vs Quantity

[B5_geek]

I think our biggest problem isn't the amount of SP*M (hehe it is a 4 letter word you know) we get, or the unrelenting advertising that we get bombarded with. I think 90% of our discontent arises from not being able to weed out the content that we do want.

I would give my left kidney if I could do a google search for an item and exclude all places that try to sell me the widget.

Google search: widget -sale

then I would gladly wade through the 5,000 sites that had INFORMATION on the widget.

Old Problems, New World

[Thenomain]

"Information Polution" isn't a new thing, we're just mainstreaming an old problem. I certainly don't want to put up with billboards, telemarketers, sidewalk evangelists or any of the advertising that comes up in my mailbox every day. I'm sure people used to complain at length about the illegitimacy of newspapers or magazines. (Okay, so they still do.)

Nowadays we don't have just a few dozen channels for information at any given time, but literally thousands, possibly more, arranged and biased exactly the way you want it. If Mr. Nielson can't handle the two he's most concerned about -- and he's more concerned about workflow than personal use -- there are existing options. Email not fast enough? Pick up the phone. IM causing worker inattention? Block it.

Small "Internet Control Panels" exist, in limited-information capacities. I have no idea how many "e-bay tracker" applications there are out there, but my guess of "a lot" would probably be an understatement. And the message-filtering abilities of many modern e-mail clients means you could easily sort everything into the locale you want. (I'm not talking spam-filtering, but scripts to filter mail from a general pool into folders.)

E-mail is hardly dead, or sick, or dying. It's abused, and like many things that are abused people will either abandon it or find a way to change it into usefulness. Both are proper social reactions. People use and adapt to the most useful channels of communication.

Mr. Nielson appears to be so far behind the issue that he probably thinks he's ahead.

Re:Junk in search results? Where?

[robogun]

Google did a good job of cleaning up THAT pollution as described here. A month ago many common pop culture searches would have turned up nothing but auto-generated commercial pages, all alike.

For example, searching on Paris Hilton after her little slip-up returned hundreds upon hundreds of affiliates all spamming the same site which, in the end, did not actually have the infamous video. Today, there are much fewer such links.

Similarly, searching on an obscure actor would return hundreds of sites all wanting to sell you posters, DVDs and videos of the movie they had their bit parts in, but little actual information.

That is a good example of information pollution, a term I heard first from Earthlink.

It is the result of affiliation, combined with legions of small-time marketers who all think their affiliate page should be number one in a category. Using the services of firms like Web Position Gold, many succeeded, pushing relevant results off the first ten pages.

Also, Amazon and Ebay have seized most of the keywords, which Google is slowly forcing off onto the paid listings.

I had actually quit Google and went over to MSN, as it had received much less attention by the page spammers and was able to return much more relevant results. But I prefer to browse using an early version of Netscape and for some reason doesn't load MSN well at all.

Google looks a lot cleaner, but spammers still seem to be trying their tricks. For instance, Google cleaned up that meta-refresh fault which would index the text full of keywords and ship you off to the spammed site once you went for it.

But spammers have come back with a javascript substitute that does the same thing.