twi-pox-e-mi-a: Delusions of Acute Awareness

In 2001, while working at Starbase Corporation as a senior information architect, I wrote about the atomization of information; the continual progression toward smaller chunks of content. It’s been seven years since I suggested knowledge artifacts would eventually be downsized to just a single thought or phrase, or perhaps a web address where a single thought or phrase lived.

My prediction came in the midst of a research project called Elmer; an attempt to unify information artifacts across multiple platforms used in software development. The goal was simple – make it easier to find stuff – specifically, relationships between related engineering processes and tasks.

Twitter is just one instance of my prediction which, at the time, seemed as natural a progression as the emerging read-write web. The trend to create and manage information artifacts with increasingly minute precision is fundamentally sound because it improves the odds that you can find artifacts more readily and employ them individually or collectively in unanticipated ways to solve or avoid problems.

The downside of this trend is the risk in making the assumption that small information objects, by themselves or even collections of objects, represent actionable knowledge. This (I believe) is where Twitter and other popular small-artifact systems drive its unsuspecting hoards of users off the cliff.

The use of 140-character systems to capture and organize information is not a bad thing in and of itself. Making assumptions or conclusions based on narrow information sources, is fundamentally risky behavior if your information diet is critical to good decision-making. If you’re pushing a grocery cart through the aisles at 7-Eleven, you probably have an eating disorder. Twitter is a poor substitute for a balanced information diet and dependence on Twitter to the exclusion of other forms of communication is likely to lead to twipoxemia.