Coping with Streams

Thanks Wildcat for opening my networking world.

In network culture information is less the product of discrete processing units than of the outcome of the networked relations between them, of links between people, between machines, and between machines and people. A node's relationship to other nodes and/or networks is more important than its own uniqueness - states Varnelis .

Social Networks allow nowadays activity streams to be displayed on third party sites. Therefore this streams became public and can be observed and manipulated inside other sites that can also make public their activity stream.

According to Gelernter Streams are real time, rapidly changing, flowing, dynamic rivers of information. Nearly all flowing, changing information on the Internet is starting to flow through streams. You are able to gather and blend together all the streams that interest you. Streams of world news or news about your friends, streams that describe prices or new findings in any field— they can be blended into one stream. Then your own personal lifestream can be added. The result is your own particular mainstream: a flow of information of all you care about.

Stream difficulties:

• In a networked mass culture bland uniformity and immediacy dominate over uniqueness and complexity, given that streams emerge from that mass culture, it is not easy to rescue non mainstream and particular interest from such an amazing amount of information.
• Most of us digest a piece of information as soon as we consume it. We read a blog post or an article, and we must let the information pass through our intellectual digestion system completely until it is processed into knowledge. This process is slow and limits the amount of information we can turn into knowledge during a period of time. So, for most of us is not possible to keep up to date with with our streams. We tend to consume more than we can process.
• Our Attention is limited.
• The information we see in the stream tends to repeat. This wastes our limited time because we need to pre-process the same information more than once.
  

Proposed Solutions:

• Get out of the flow every so often to rest and reassess the situation. Let the flow pass you by and take a break. The stream will continue to flow without you.
• Pick a few streams to monitor at a time. Then portage on over to another stream or two for awhile, taking a break from the others (proposes Jeff Sayre).
• Get rid of redundant information in an automatic way.
• Develop new tools that help us spot the information from the past we were not able to process in time but we still find relevant.
• Create new visualizations to allow us to identify most relevant information to us at the present time. This could be done with the use of a personalized automatic data analyzer.
• Create and use tools to help people filter the information. Filtering in its essence is a process of attenuation - a way to focus attention more efficiently on signal versus noise. Broadly speaking there are many forms of filtering from automated filtering, to social filtering, to personalization, but they all come down to helping someone focus their finite attention more efficiently on the things they care about most (says Nova Spivak).