I spoke yesterday at The Economist conference, Information: Making Sense of the Deluge. Very interesting speakers, I was excited to go. The stated and sincere intent was to get a discussion going, including the audience. But the format was like watching TV news (and I don’t mean PBS): toss someone on stage, let them roll a 6 minute video, answer a few questions, and on to the next. This format was good for Twitter-bytes, but not for thinking or reflecting or building ideas.
One of the topics was Nick Carr on how “pseudo-multitasking” is hurting our brains. The conference itself seemed to follow the same format. This morning, for example, the schedule for the first 50 minutes has 7 different people on stage, in four sessions:
Act II: Bottom up: Information for people8.35 amFlash of genius: How to translate the internetLuis von Ahn, A. Nico Habermann, Associate Professor, Carnegie Mellon University8.45 amFlash of genius: Turning information into knowledgeAmit Singhal, Engineer, Google8.55 amData exhaustThe intersection of search and big dataLuc Barthelet, Executive Director, Wolfram AlphaArkady Borkovsky, Chief Technology Officer, Yandex LabsModerator: Kenneth Cukier, Business Correspondent, The Economist9.15 amFlash of genius: The information entrepreneurScott Yara,Vice-president, Products and Co-founder, Greenplum
The audience is finding plenty to Twitter about. But 10 minutes is only time for a sales pitch; it is not enough time to discuss the weaknesses as well as the strengths of an idea.
On the plus side, this means there’s still a need for academics who can sit in an empty room and work on one thing for an hour. Of course to accomplish that I have to discipline myself not to check email…..
A friend who was there told me he “never follows Twitter.” It turns out that he means he keeps a Twitter feed in the corner of his screen 100% of the time; he just does not explicitly devote time to reading it! Talk about distractions…
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