The Future of Personal Information Management, Part 1. William Jones
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“personal information management” is coined48 amidst a general excitement over the potential of the personal computer to greatly enhance the human ability to process and manage information. The 1980s also saw the advent of so-called “PIM tools” that provided limited support for the management of such things as appointments and scheduling, to-do lists, phone numbers, and addresses. And a community dedicated to the study and improvement of human-computer interaction also emerged in the 1980s49.
1990s & 2000s. A field is born.
The Web is developed50. And so in succession are cell phones, personal digital assistants (PDAs), “smartphones” and integrative handheld devices that can seemingly do everything (except, it sometimes seems, establish a clear telephone connection)51. The process of building a community for the study of PIM began with a Special Interest Group session on personal information management, which was organized as part of the CHI 2004 conference on human-computer interaction52. But perhaps the watershed event in the creation of a PIM community was PIM 2005—a special NSF-sponsored workshop53 held in January of 2005 in Seattle54. The participants formed a nexus for follow-on workshops55, special issues56 and an edited book on PIM57.
1.5 A NEOLITHIC REVOLUTION IN PERSONAL INFORMATION MANAGEMENT
PIM is undergoing profound change. In our efforts to understand and track this change, we search for historical metaphors. This search takes us back in time—farther back than the 1940’s and the dawning of the digital age—all the way back to the Stone Age.
Our ancestors were foragers. Before and even when they could hunt, our ancestors gathered and they scavenged the kills left by other animals. Application of the foraging metaphor has led to the development of information foraging models of PIM58: These models align our PIM activities with the food gathering activities of our ancestors during the Paleolithic age (early Stone Age). Under foraging models, we move from place to place across our informational landscape in ways that maximize the value of the information we expect to receive.
The Neolithic Age59 (new Stone Age) followed the Paleolithic Age and farming followed foraging. Food foraged in the Paleolithic Age was farmed instead in the Neolithic age. Animals once hunted were domesticated and herded60.
What about information farming? Will we “farm” information61 rather than forage for it? And is the foraging model apt to begin with? Underlying both a foraging and a farming metaphor for PIM is a metaphor of information as food.
Is the metaphor of information as food apt?
There are interesting parallels to consider between food and information. Are we getting a “balanced” diet of information or too much informational sugar and fat in the form of, for example, of gossip magazines, celebrity tweets and news shows that treat political debates as sporting contests? Are we becoming informationally obese? We generally know little about the providers of the information we “consume.” Do we need regulatory assurances for the quality of our information—comparable to those we expect for the food we eat?
These and other parallels notwithstanding, there are also important differences between information and food. Our bodies require certain essential vitamins and minerals but these can come from a variety of different foods. Vitamin C can come from a grapefruit or a freshly killed seal. Our bodies are adept at converting food from one form to another—from fat to sugars for energy now or, conversely, from carbohydrates to the fat of adipose tissue for use later on. Information is not a stuff to be so easily converted. Once informed that the stock markets closed lower today, we may make the inference that a stock we own is also trading lower. But such a “conversion” is neither straightforward nor assured. Farther afield, knowledge of the markets does not convert to a forecast for tomorrow’s trading or for the weekend weather.
On the other hand, we can do with information what we cannot do with food: We can eat our informational cake and still have it. We do this, for example, when we watch re-runs of a favorite show on TV or listen for the nth time to a favorite piece of music or when we view again, with equal pleasure, the photographs we took during a summer vacation. Moreover, information consumed by us is still available for consumption by others. We can forward our photos.
Metaphors of information foraging and information farming may do more to challenge our creative abilities than to illuminate the challenges we face in managing our information.
For example, we “forage” for information in ways that build upon the information we have acquired already. This would seem to be quite unlike the foraging our ancestors did for berries. Facing a long, cold winter, we might always act to maximize the number of berries we gather. Facing a trip to Boston, our informational foraging quickly changes focus as a function of task: decide on dates of travel; book plane tickets; book hotel; make appointments and dinner reservations. Each task demands its own distinct kind of information. With task completion, the associated “informational berries” quickly lose their value. Once hotel reservations have been made, for example, there is little point to a continued gathering of information concerning alternate hotels62.
Likewise, there are oddities with the application of a farming metaphor. We may think of situations where the metaphor is apt. We plant the “seed” of a blog post, for example, to grow a “vine” in the form of responses from others. But, more often, the metaphor seems strained. How do we sow our informational seeds? How is the field watered, fertilized and weeded? Is there a growing season? Are we informationally poor for the months of the growing season only to feast on an autumnal harvest? To be sure, we store information. But is this done to stave off an informational famine? Do we ration our information during the long months of winter?
Again, we can find answers to these questions. But these answers are more a testament to our creativity than to the aptness or utility of the foraging and farming metaphors. Exercises in the mapping of these metaphors do little to advance our understanding for the challenges of PIM.
In what sense, then, might we be facing a Neolithic Revolution in personal information? The original Neolithic Revolution brought about two profound changes in the way people lived and in their relationship to the world about them.
1. People actively worked not just to live in their environment but to change it.
2. People settled down.
Efforts to change the environment likely began in the Paleolithic Age with, for example, a seasonal firing of the prairie grasses to promote new growth in edible grasses and a return of game to feed on this growth63. But a transition to farming required a much greater, more local, and more focused concentration of efforts to control the environment. #2 above followed from #1. Ground must be tilled and fenced in to protect against the predations of animals, wild and domesticated. Granaries must be built to store the harvest. Walls must be built to protect against attack from neighboring nomadic tribes. Sedentism is self-reinforcing. It now makes sense to invest greater effort in permanent structures of habitation. Tools no longer need to be portable. Pottery, a heavy, non-portable kind of tool, is developed uniformly and independently across Neolithic cultures isolated from one another in time and space64.
The parallels for personal information are approximate but intriguing. We have long been told that we live in an “information age.” In a developed country like the United States, the onset of this age is sometimes traced back to a time in the 1950s when the number of white collar jobs exceeded the number of farming and blue collar jobs65. But we could extend backwards in time to a point where literacy, as promoted by public education, became widespread. We might well go farther back in time to the invention of the printing press and a resulting widespread availability of printed material in the form of newspapers, pamphlets and books.
Our understanding of our world is shaped not only by direct experience but also, indirectly, through the information we receive from books, billboards, magazines, newspapers, radio, TV and, of course, the Web. As Whittaker, S. (2011) notes we don’t simply consume, we also curate, that is, we keep and manage information for later use. When print media dominated, for example, people