Compared to some people, I probably appear to be an extreme consumer of information. I follow a few hundred RSS feeds, 60-odd people on Twitter, belong to more listservs than I should, and so on. Compared to others – say uber-bloggers Robert Scoble or Mike Arrington – my information diet hardly registers. I’m always impressed by information omnivores, but I realize that my skills and time availability place me at a different space on the information consumption continuum.
Lately, I’ve been thinking about information consumption as a budgeting process. This is certainly not new – the earliest theories of information explored uncertainty reduction and budgeting. In the early days of the telegraph, Morse’s code, and the machines designed to use the code, were adopted because they transferred information more efficiently than Cooke’s machines. How we can fit the most information in the littlest amount of space/time is the essential challenge for many in the field.
Feeds – be they an RSS stream, Twitter or Facebook Newsfeeds, have driven the concept of budgeting home. Unlike an inbox, to which anyone has access, our feeds are managed, pruned, scoped and, most importantly, gatekept. When we subscribe to an RSS feed, or follow someone on Twitter, the information they send is equated into our budgets. If the person posts 100 blog posts or twitters a day, it is likely that we’re overloaded with information, that our budget is blown.
In the early days of Twitter, I noticed that my information budgets were consistently being blown. As new users joined the service, unaware of the norms and necessary economy of information, my personal information budget was a mess – I couldn’t keep up with the small number of people I tried to follow. However, over time, I’ve noticed a shift. Call it an acculturation, a calming, or perhaps an evolution – but information budgeting seems to have evolved among Twitterers. Of course, this does not apply to publicity-seekers, but I think that more or Twitter’s users are considering their followers information budgets when they cast off a new message.
Of course, short of data collection, I don’t have any way to prove my hypothesis, but it has stuck with me long enough that I thought I might investigate the cognitive underpinnings. In a chapter from Perspectives on Socially Shared Cognition, Krauss and Fussel write about Constructing Shared Communicative Environments. In a nascent communication environment, the communication process is influenced by the development of common grounds; our knowledge of our self, audience and context influence the communication processes. According to the authors, we “do indeed take the informational status of a listener into account” in creating messages.
In a face-to-face conversation, we’re always taking our audience into account. We watch for body language – rolling of the eyes, scrunching of the brow. These cues inform what we communicate and how we go about the communication process. How, then, do we read Twitter? Twitter is full of cues – we know who follows us, how many followers we have, we get direct messages. At the same time, Twitter is new. It is more a living discussion forum than it is a person-to-person IM conversation. With this new form, new behaviors must emerge.
Have we evolved our communication processes in Twitter? I think this is inarguable. We Twitter differently than we did six months ago, and new behaviors and fads are constantly emerging. But are we budgeting our communication, reflecting our desires for a more sensible information space? Has Twitter become more sensible to me because I’ve developed literacies, or have we simply decided that the space works better if we post less and stay on topic more? Again, I’m not sure this is happening, but I do think that our shared cognition – of our identities, the information budgets of self and others – affects our perceptions and behaviors.
The process of communicative evolution in social spaces is fascinating, and instructive for those who study information and communities. One wonders if processes of Gemeinschaft inform information budgeting, or vice versa. Krauss and Fussell note that our communication processes are continually informed by knowledge of audience and the rules of interaction. Notably, both of these are inherently evolutionary, a theory that fits nicely into our always-changing and ill-defined online spaces.
Fred Stutzman is a doctoral student, researcher and teaching fellow at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's School of Information and Library Science. He studies how people use social media.
