Clay Johnson, writing about the nature of notifications in software:
Left at the default, we create an economy of sensational notifications, with the brightest minds of our generation trying to figure out how to get us to click on the next command for our attention. Can you imagine what would happen if they were instead focused on providing us content worthy of it?
Dear Internet: It’s No Longer OK to Not Know How Congress Works. This post is so well put. The tools our political representatives use may seem horrendously backwards, but they are reality and to affect change we have to understand how they work.
Information consumption also has a consumption chain, just like food does. Most news, for instance, comes from a set of facts on the ground, that get processed, and processed and processed again before it ends up on your television set boiled down into chunks for you to consume. But it also gets filled with additives— expert opinion, analysis, visualizations, you name it— before it gets to you. If this was food, a vegan would want none of it. They’d head straight to the data, to the source, to the facts, and try and get as much of that additive business out of their way.
Clay Johnson – Why Infovegan. via Daniel.