The thesis of Steven Johnson’s lecture, The Glass Box And The Commonplace Book is that a single piece of information that is designed to flow through an entire ecosystem of news will create more value than a piece of information sealed up in a glass box. He calls this the “textual productivity” of the ecosystem, and it may be the single most important fact about the Web’s growth in the last fifteen years:
Think about it this way: let’s say it’s 1995, and you are cultivating a page of “hot links” to interesting discoveries on the Web. You find an article about a Columbia journalism lecture and you link to it on your page. The information value you have created is useful exclusively to two groups: people interested in journalism who happen to visit your page, and the people maintaining the Columbia page, who benefit from the increased traffic. Fast forward to 2010, and you check-in at Foursquare for this lecture tonight, and tweet a link to a description of the talk. What happens to that information? For starters, it goes out to friends of yours, and into your twitter feed, and into Google’s index. The geo-data embedded in the link alerts local businesses who can offer your promotions through foursquare; the link to the talk helps Google build its index of the web, which then attracts advertisers interested in your location or the topic of journalism itself. Because that tiny little snippet of information is free to make new connections, by checking in here you are helping your friends figure out what to do tonight; you’re helping the Journalism school in promoting this venue; you’re helping the bar across Broadway attract more customers, you’re helping Google organize the web; you’re helping people searching google for information about journalism; you’re helping journalism schools advertising on Google to attract new students. Not bad for 140 characters.
Millions of us track ourselves all the time. We record our weight. We count calories. We balance our checkbooks. But as electronic senors have gotten smaller and better and as social media has made it normal to share everything, the process of self-tracking is becoming more alluring and more meaningful: pedometers at our feet, breathalyzers in our lungs, and glucose monitors in our veins. This isn’t the traditional, therapeutic notion of personal development, says Gary Wolf, but rather the self of our most trivial thoughts and actions that would go unnoticed without technical help. “Their validity may be narrow, but it is beautifully relevant.” It all seemed a little too trivial to me, until Wolf tells the story of Bo Adler who suffers from sleep apnea and resisted the standard course of treatment because he did not want to be treated as a standard case until there was evidence that he was a standard case. After all, are any of us really standard cases: