marypcbuk

If we're drowning in email and past the point of keeping up with everyone we've reconnected with on Facebook, why are we flocking to Twitter? If we can't settle down to work because instant messages keep popping up on top of the document, why are we adding to the load by uploading videos to YouTube and answering questions on Quora?

Texture is a really interesting book that's full of facts and thoughts and ideas and references and I might still not be sure what I think of it. It's academic in approach (Baudrillard and Derrida by page 10, footnotes and references for every chapter), but very real world in what it says. It verges close to pseudery on occasion (click through to the full review on ZDNet for my favourite example as well as a lot more detail about what's in the book) but it lectures the scaremongers right back. I've not yet interviewed Richard Harper - I'd like to - but I have spoken twice to his research partner Abigail Sellen and I've been following their team's work for years, so I loved getting an inside view on projects like the Harry Potter clock (really that should be the Weasley clock). He's remarkably honest about whether some of the more ambitious MSR projects for dealing with information overload will ever come to fruition (including one I covered for the FT three years ago and and occasionally wonder about; it was delightful to sit in a meeting with Eric Horvitz and know that the only people who could interrupt us were his wife and Bill Gates, both of whom I'm happy to defer to). More than anything, Texture is thought provoking - and that's always a good thing in a book.

And I don't just mean the travelling ;-)

The Marc Smith interview I did for the FT on email overload and social metadata is going to be reprinted in a Swiss business newspaper called CASH. Presumably translated into Swiss German, though I'm not sure yet.

There was a fascinating talk at a press event for 2007 Office collaboration tools yesterday by Carsten Sorensen of the LSE covering how changes in manufacturing technology had defined early working conditions both physical and social, so that it's OK to interrupt people at work but not in a private space because by definition employees are available. Made me think of the stress induced by the Victorian stock tickers by telegraph whcih extended the working day to the club or the home. IT is having that effect: your fluid working day with information requested by email or IM is my interruption. Interconnect everyone for synergy and you make everyone deal with the impact of that on their work and we haven't got the working practices to deal with it, or often the right management attitude. I did like his story of 'email man' - a guy at Deutsche Bank who responds to 1,000 emails a day and who he descrived as an 'interaction machine'.