Adelaide' cough ,actions and the Internet age

"The information-action ratio was a concept coined by cultural critic Neil Postman (1931 – 2003) in his work Amusing Ourselves to Death. In short, Postman meant to indicate the relationship between a piece of information and what action, if any, a consumer of that information might reasonably be expected to take once learning it."

This is a great concept from Postman's book. Now people are all enchanted with receiving more information, being well-informed, who cares about "action"? I love the way Postman tried to bring to our attention: it's the action that really changes our world.

The concept was coined to show Postman's concern with the telegraph techonology.

Prior to the telegraph, Postman says people received information relative to their lives, creating a high correlation between information and action ...so that most people had a sense of being able to control some of the contingencies in their lives

The telegraph allowed bits of information to travel long distances ...the local and the timeless ... lost their central position in newspapers, eclipsed by the dazzle of distance and speed 

Postman argued,

Someone may know (Princess)Adelaide has the whooping cough (via telegraph) , but what could anyone do about it?

It should be true in the telegraph age that the newspapar reader can't do anything except maybe making it a topic in a leisure chatting.

But in the Internet age, people can actually "do something" when they read the news, which similarly "travels long distances"(breaking the location&time limit). For example, they can re-tweet it, or share it on Google reader,or Facebook. With enough re-tweets, "Adelaide has the whooping cough" could even rise to the Trend on Twitter.com or Google Trends.

Could we conclude that in the Internet age we have a high information-action ratio than in telegraph age? I find it an interesting question.

The so-called "actions" per Postman's original definition probably include:1) provide medical advice or support to cure Princess Adelaide's cough 2) ask Princess Adelaide to take more exercice, etc. Those are "reasonable" "direct"actions to be performed against Adelaide's cough.

"Retweet"?"Share"? Can these be called "actions" ? Someone will say no, because neither "Retweet" nor "Share" could cure Princess Adelaide's cough. There is no direct or prompt effect to Adelaide's problem.

What if the real purpose of this news is to implicate Princess Adelaide has a bad health,which probably threatens her reign, rather than emphasis on the cough that can be easily cured by pills? In this case,the Princess needs more support. Being listed on the Twitter's trend or Google Trends will win more attention, and this could possibly bring the Princess higher support rate,
and "Retweet" or "Share" can be helpful.

The magic of the Internet age is that it provides people with more chance to "take action", no matter "Retweet" or "Share", which, I shall say, is a good remedy for the "unablility" people felt in the telegraph age.

Thinking on Twitter's Suggested Users List (SUL)

Twitter has a Suggested Users List (SUL), which is for the new comer to get started in Twitter's following-followed game. The SUL has been critisized by lots of people since it's online.

It created two levels of users, insiders and outsiders
It screwed with the integrity of every person and organization that was on the list, or who hoped to be on it.
It destroyed the value of the one potential metric for authority, follower count.

Dave Winer has great posts on the dilamma of the SUL. It seems Twitter is serious about the list and they update it now to a new one with categories.

They use certain algorithm to generate the list , and try to make people believe that the list is fair, not controlled by human power or money power.

We’ve created a number of algorithms to identify users across a variety of clusters who tweet actively and are engaged with their audiences. These new algorithms help us group these active users into lists of users by interests. Rather than suggesting a random set of 20 users for a new user to follow, now we let users browse into the areas they are interested in and choose who they want to follow from these lists.

The interesting thing is the algorithm is not open to the outside world, how can people believe it's a fair play without knowing the rule of the play?

Since the SUL is definitely useful in many conditions, here are some ideas for the design:

1, Make it a A-Z catalogue if Twitter insists on a catalogue UI. No one will question the A-Z algorithm.

2, Patent the current algorithm behind the SUL and make it open to the outside。

This is just like the Google's pagerank technology, people have less questions when they can query/understand the rule in a game.

3, Make two lists. One is for people to pay to be there, the more they pay, the higher ranking they are on the list. The other list is either A-Z catalogue or list with algorithm open to the outside.

The SUL is useful but I don't think it's as important as "Search user" function on Twitter. Twitter should get more effort to improve the Search user, just leave the SUL as simple as it is. Think about Google Directory and Google Search, you'll know what I mean.