Information technology is messed up. The Internet is too slow, my computer is too slow. This program doesn’t work, this feature doesn’t work the way I want it to. This website is hard to use. Complaints
Technology has gotten faster and software has gotten more sophisticated, but what have really gotten better at?
Maybe everything is better — and maybe it is just how it is framed against our current expectations of software and systems that make things seem like it doesn’t work all that well.
The problem is the cadence. The computerscajdvthe humans are out of sync. Computers are at the point where they multitask (or rapidly task switch) faster and more effectively than humans can.
Computers don’t have that same need to cognitively reset between tasks. The computer equivalent of what was I doing is that moment when you reopen an app that crashed and asks to reopen everything that was open when the system crashed.
That is a super convenient feature, but it brings your mind back to that same old place of cognitive disarray.
Sure you need 10 browser tabs open at once, 5 word proceeding documents, 3 spreadsheets and 8 different emails open at once.
This is no way to work, but perhaps this is the only way that humans matter in relationship to work. Humans can see how these tidbits of information are supposed to connect in order to complete a task,
Of course, information is scattered everywhere. Computers can find information very well, but they don’t necessarily put all the pieces together well. Computers use proxy information to figure out context and relationships. Humans do that too, but they are better at picking out nuance. Over time due to machine learning, computers will get better at this…
But in the big picture, the relationship between humans, information and technology is complicated. We use all kinds of simplifications to make things work, but by the time everything is simplified an awful lot is left out. Information technology is messed up, hutbso is the relationship between humans and information.
