Attention-enhancing information retrieval
William Webber writes:
Last week I was at SWIRL, the occasional talkshop on the future of information retrieval. To me the most important of the presentations was Dianne Kelly’s “Rage against the Machine Learning”, in which she observed the way information retrieval currently works has changed the way people think. In particular, she proposed that the combination of short query with snippet response has reworked peoples’ plastic brains to focus on working memory, and forgo the processing of information required for it to lay its tracks down in our long term memory. In short, it makes us transactionally adept, but stops us from learning.
This is as important as Bret Victor’s presentation.
I particularly liked the line:
Various fanciful scenarios were given, but the ultimate end-point of such a research direction is that you walk into the shopping mall, and then your mobile phone leads you round telling you what to buy.
Reminds me of a line I remember imperfectly as judging from advertising, we are all “…insecure, sex-starved neurotics with 15-second attention spans.”
I always thought that was being generous on the attention span but opinions differ on that point. 😉
How do you envision your users? Serious question but not one you have to answer here. Ask yourself.