Bit Literacy - Mark Hurst [6]
Bit literacy doesn’t even mean that you should engage fewer bits. To the contrary, the goal is to free users so they can engage as many bits as they want, and yet never feel overloaded. The actual quantity of bits you engage, whether it’s higher or lower from one day to the next, is immaterial. The important thing is to learn how to engage the bits appropriately—to do the right thing with the bits at the right time. To rephrase Ecclesiastes, there’s a time to save, and a time to erase; a time to turn on, and a time to turn off; a time for all actions. But one must always look for ways to let the bits go. There is no other way to work in a world of infinite bits.
I sometimes demonstrate bit literacy in seminars by drawing on a whiteboard. I draw a square with nothing inside, just blank white space. Then I write a word in the box. There was nothing in the square before, and now there’s one thing in it. The word is plainly visible.
Then I draw another square, the same size as the first. I use the marker to color in the entire box, so it’s all ink and no whiteboard showing. Then I ask everyone: what’s the best way to transmit a message in this environment? If we produce a new word, what happens? I write a word in the square, and it’s invisible. It’s just ink on more ink—there’s too much ink already, and no contrast, to show what or where the word is. I can write more words, but as much as I try to write, still no message is transmitted. The environment is saturated with information and further writing does nothing. What, I ask, is the solution?
A clever student knows the answer right away: grab the eraser. If I take the eraser to that second square, completely saturated by ink, I can finally communicate in the noisy environment by taking away some of the material inside. I can write a word with the eraser; or I can erase a section of the whiteboard, allowing me to write new words in that space; or I can erase the entire square interior, allowing the reader to focus completely on the next word that’s written there.
When bits are infinite, the only way to thrive is to pick up the eraser. This is letting the bits go: always looking for reasons to delete, defer, or filter bits that come our way. Anything else allows the bits to pile up. Success comes when we get the square empty. Thus another way of describing bit literacy is the constant attempt, in a world of infinite bits, to achieve emptiness.3
Emptiness is at the heart of bit literacy, and that may be an unsettling idea. Emptiness often has negative connotations: “I got nothing out of it.” “This is leaving me empty.” We prefer to have something. We live in a culture, after all, where more is better. The symbol of success is abundance, measured in size and quantity: bigger houses, for example, containing more stuff. This isn’t a moral judgment but merely a point about acquisition. In a world where resources are finite, or scarce, people are often evaluated by how much stuff they have.
Things are different in the bit world, where size and quantity don’t mean much. Bits are abundantly available to anyone with Internet access. Like the ink in the colored square on the whiteboard, the challenge isn’t getting more; it’s making sense of it all, in spite of the glut. The scarce resource is not the bits but our time and attention to deal with them. Success in the bit world comes from creating a quiet, empty place where we can focus on the bits we want, when we want them.
Emptiness brings with it one immediate benefit: relief. I call it being “done,” a state that many people haven’t experienced for many years, if ever. Growing up I had a ritual on the last day of school for just this purpose. After I returned home from the final class, I would throw all my folders and papers into the backyard grill and light a match. There was something freeing about seeing all the projects and papers disappear into smoke. Summer had officially started, and I was done. No more class assignments,