Bit Literacy - Mark Hurst [0]
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Bit Literacy
Productivity in the Age of Information and E-mail Overload
By Mark Hurst
Good Experience Press
Copyright © 2007 by Good Experience, Inc.
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Good Experience Press,
an imprint of Good Experience, Inc., New York.
www.goodexperiencepress.com
Table of Contents
Preface
Part I: The Context
Chapter 1: Bits
Chapter 2: Users
Chapter 3: The Solution
Part II: The Method
Chapter 4: Managing Incoming E-mail
Chapter 5: Managing Todos
Chapter 6: The Media Diet
Chapter 7: Managing Photos
Chapter 8: Creating Bits
Chapter 9: File Formats
Chapter 10: Naming Files
Chapter 11: Storing Files
Chapter 12: Other Essentials
Chapter 13: The Future of Bit Literacy
- - -
Appendix A: Message to Developers
Appendix B: On Mac vs. Windows
Afterword by Phil Terry
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The Buddha resides quite as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission as he does at the top of a mountain.
— Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Preface
I was five years old when I first encountered the digital world. It was 1978, and I was in kindergarten in Subic Bay, Philippines, during my father's Pacific tour as a naval officer. One day my teacher welcomed a guest speaker to the class, a uniformed marine who carried in a strange, TV-like box and set it on a table. We gathered around, peering at the glowing screen. I was transfixed. Every few seconds, colored blocks appeared all over, in random places. The marine told us to touch the screen.
My classmates and I each put a finger somewhere on the screen. We waited for the computer to refresh the pattern of blocks, and the moment it did, I saw a brightly colored rectangle sitting directly underneath my index finger. It was a strange and exhilarating moment; how had the computer known I was waiting for it, then and there, to appear?
It was only a trivial computer program intended for the class demonstration, but for me it created a pivotal moment. I could feel that I was touching something more than a screen, more than some glowing filaments. I felt a connection—almost physically—to something deeper, beyond the screen, that was dynamic and responsive, almost alive. So began my lifelong fascination with digital technology.
I grew up during a formative time for the technology industry and became familiar with many kinds of computers, video games, and other digital devices. But by the time I went to MIT to study computer science, something new and different was taking shape: the Internet. Within a few years I witnessed the spread of e-mail and the Web to people all around me—family, friends, and classmates—who quickly adopted the new tools into their lives.
Today hundreds of millions of people around the world are online, using millions of websites and applications and over a billion e-mail addresses. Computers, cameras, cell phones, PDAs, and a menagerie of other devices connect people to each other across the network, and data floods from device to device in an unending torrent, for an infinite variety of uses: e-mails, phone calls, photos, videos, meetings, classes, games, music, and on and on and on. All of the data is made of nothing but tiny electrical impulses, signifying 1s and 0s: these are bits, short for "binary digits."1 Everything digital, everything you see and read and use on a computer or digital device, is made of bits: e-mails, Web pages, computer graphics, spreadsheets and documents, downloaded music, everything.
The popularity and easy access of bits, thanks to the Internet, have created both an opportunity—for new experiences and tools and services—and a new crisis. People are overloaded by too many bits, everywhere, all the time. I've noticed in recent years that most people don't know how to deal with the constant deluge of bits, and they suffer as a result. Millions of people are