Comments on: Information Budgets and Shared Cognition

By: A Memorable Fancy › Writing and Blogging

A Memorable Fancy › Writing and Blogging — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 14:49:50 +0000

[...] RSS feeds, etc. I have found a useful way of looking at these is through Fred Stutzman’s idea of Information Budgeting. We basically have only a certain amount of attention to give, and it is important to budget our [...]

By: fred

fred — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 11:42:00 +0000

Check out Michael Rees analysis - very cool!

By: Aaron Bowen

Aaron Bowen — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 00:21:00 +0000

I imagine it is not just the cognitive load the content bears, but also the frequency of new content coming to us. At 140 character’s, Twitter definitely doesn’t take much concentration to absorb, but being disrupted every 15 minutes with a new update can be (and is) distracting. I think you are right, Fred, to suggest that the phenomenon of the disruptive “let me update you every 15 minutes” messages is declining and the more even-tempered “let me update you on the important stuff” mindset is setting in (in large part brought on by the “argh, I don’t care about every last detail of your existence” reaction invoked by the disruptive model). Though as you say, it would be nice to have some hard research to verify this thought.

By: jkd

jkd — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 17:39:00 +0000

Yup – it’s all about cognitive load. I’d be interested to see what the difference is (if any, though I suspect it’s there) between how we process 140-character-delimited messages and longer-format content (not just text but also audio, video). Twitter at the level of cognitive processing would be, I’d wager, a fairly lightweight column in the attention ledger – but, as you note, the format can also lead to overload in an always-demanding-your-attention manner.

I think that Twitter has, as with many mediums (and communities within those mediums), developed its own set of metanarratives and practices that serve as information-saving devices. So much of what happens there is a reference or glancing blow to something else, to shared understandings and offloaded cognitive cycles.