Signal to Noise in Design
I have a high school reunion coming up, so I’m paying more attention to, and spending more time on, my health and fitness. My workload has been (thankfully) significant, and as a result the pressure on my time is at record highs.
I try to remain abreast. No high school humor intended. I have for years been tweaking google alerts, RSS feeds in my reader, Twitter lists and searches and groups — all to try to instrument the flow of information which is overwhelming, growing, and, in my opinion, 99.99999% (that’s five nines for you carrier-grade readers) junk. Crap. S#!t.
When I started my business (and no longer had corporate IT support), I became a much more frequent user of the online forum. Specifically, for annoying Windows XP problems, or issues arising within my temperamental home backup server. I was blown away by the number of cloned support sites there are — loaded up with stolen junk just to create a content farm which SEO bots will favor in order to drive advertising clicks. Blown away, and profoundly disappointed. I felt a lot like you do after you pass through a flea market. Just a little grimy from the overwhelming quantity of bogus product.
The rates at which information is being created (or in too many cases, duplicated, stolen, reused, plagiarized) is phenomenal. We are creating so much digital information that the shrinking percentage of content which we actually print is still driving growth in our global consumption of paper. Though we print less as an overall percentage of the content we interact with over time, print growth is outstripping those “performance improvements.”
There’s hypocrisy in here somewhere. On our naive and idealist side, we love the idea of information being free, thanks to the internet. Access may not be free, but it is relatively cheap (at least for us in developed regions). But what Frankenstein have we created? Content is stolen willy-nilly. We spend otherwise quality innovation cycles trying to find ways to automate ad clicks and to generate more and more spam.
How many snake oil emails have you received this week, offering to generate you $6723 per week while you channel-surf from the couch using the new app there is for that? I rarely applaud Microsoft, but was thrilled to hear they had “decapitated” the Rustock botnet. A significant victory in the #signal2noise campaign trail.
For my part, I’m going to use the #signal2noise hashtag and do my darndest to identify both the sublime and the ridiculous on the signal to noise front. Today I tweeted about Joe Roy’s blog, because Joe is “teaching me how to fish.” His plain guidance on straight talk helps me use fewer words to express my thoughts.
Are you willing to join this crusade? I’ll be looking for your tweets and comments and posts…
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