by Wyatt Wood
I’m tired of being looked down on as the young pup because I’m not doing it the old way. Now that this is out of the way, I’m really focusing on philosophical debates about the Internet making the younger generation (me) lazy, and if so I take it as a compliment.
Online, laziness involves reclaiming time by improving efficiency and quality. Even CNN is picking up on the fact with a list of tips for workers to get ahead by being lazy (thanks to Jenn for the tip). Efficiency is determined by improving position through knowledge or experience. It’s really understanding that “Slacking” is really just figuring out how to be more efficient.
So why is the debate important? Learning to effectively search for what you want to know — and filtering the rest out — keeps your mind fresh. It’s not about storing the knowledge, rather understanding the tools to find it quickly and move on. Successful management of the conversation centralizes around filtering the noise from the desired results. Currently the concept of keyword search is the de-facto method of research (finding things) on the Internet.
Enter Lazy Feed, one of the next generation filtering tools based on the topic what you really want to know (in real time). Jolie O’Dell nailed the core “driving innovation” of the service as appealing to the root of user laziness. I love this tool because it makes me efficiently lazy when searching blogs for a topic. In the past, I would subscribe to gobs of RSS feeds, and still do, but this goes one step further – by giving me the latest information for topic I need. While the site has been around for a few months (which is light years in Internet time) the concept is here to stay because of gaining traction with improved features.
The simplistic nature of how results are received makes research more spontaneous.
With the advent of real time web you have the latest trend for communication across the wire. With the influx of communication as it is happening search is more important than ever, not just your gen X flavor of search. Now it’s about filtering the noise from the info you need to know.
“Efficiently lazy”, I love it. Reminds me of my driving description, “Safely Aggressive”. While I agree that emerging web tools allow us to be more efficient, I feel there is a danger in becoming too reliant on this technology. Have you ever encountered the person that will only communicate via email? Sometimes a phone call can take care of everything in a minute that 6 emails back and forth can still not resolve.
I also feel there is a lost value in retained or truly learned information. For me it started with MS Word underlining and correcting my spelling errors as I went along. I sometimes now find myself typing a note in word before writing it by hand. Google has also made information on everything readily accessible, but true knowledge of a subject more rare. The old adage “jack of all trades, master of none”.
That said, I embrace all these tools (just trying out lazy feed) and do feel they provide me with more relevant information in real time than I ever had access to in the past. But lazy is lazy, and with great power comes great responsibility.
I agree becoming too reliant on the technology is risk – and the goal is not to be tied to a particular vendor (OS, service, brand etc) but rather to the concept of saving time. So to be successful it has to cut down the time spent trying to figure out where to find the information and actually serve up the results.
I only write hand written notes now for the impact of the amount of time it took me to write – otherwise it’s an email or variation of a txt message. I admit I’m lazy when it comes to messaging – but the idea of using a service to communicate just because it’s “cool” verses the impact or the efficiency is ridiculous.
Read a book!