信息时代不可承受之重

    这个月我断了网——彻底断掉了。我关掉了iPhone，设置了假期自动回复邮件，开始了为期两周的度假生活。假期第二天，我就不再条件反射似地去摸手机了。一周以后，我一次能连续读书一个多小时了。但是一回到家中，我又得面对让人清醒的现实：收件箱里塞着1,379封未读邮件。

    而这还只是工作邮件而已。

    我的重要性并不像未读邮件数字显示的那么高，我也不是唯一一个遇到过这种情况的人，很有可能你也为此头疼不已，而且这个问题似乎愈演愈烈了。以前，人们在暑假旅游时通常只是偶尔查收一下邮件，今年却开始流行“数字休假”（digital sabbatical，社交媒体研究者丹纳•博伊德甚至就这个话题写了一篇攻略）。就像一位朋友在外出自动回复邮件中所写的：“我将于8月5日至20日暂停连接互联网，在此期间不会回复邮件。”就连偶尔查收邮件都取消了——今年夏天我们需要一个真正的假期！

    然而，这种潮流并不是要大张旗鼓地反对电邮。电邮是个神奇的发明，它能让人们充分、免费地沟通。想想看，在不到一个世纪的时间里，人类实现了何等巨大的跨越：1915年（我祖父出生那年），亚历山大•格雷厄姆•贝尔在纽约拨通了打往旧金山的电话，这是首个横贯美国大陆的电话，当时这个3分钟的通话价格根据通胀率调整后高达440美元。而今天，我能通过Gmail的账户与远在布达佩斯和东京的朋友进行视频通话——而且完全免费。真是太神奇了。

    这不只是一通电话，更是对创新的呼唤。关于电话的这一历史细节来自乔恩•加特纳的新书《创意工厂：贝尔实验室和美国创新大时代》（The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation），这无疑是我在2012年读到的最重要的著作。加特纳认为，通讯是美国经济在20世纪遭遇的最大挑战，为此他生动地描绘了贝尔实验室率先开发的创新方案。

    敏锐的读者在有关贝尔实验室崛起的历史记述中不难发现很多如今似曾相识的创新要素：背景各异却充分协作的团队，用来研发个人兴趣项目的自由工作时间等，这些做法现在早已被硅谷最富创新能力的公司奉为圭臬。而掩卷之后让我深思数月的问题出现在最后一章——加特纳问道：“便捷的信息通道是不是不仅扩展了我们的生活范围，同时也给我们的生活带来了大量的限制？”

    简而言之，为了解决一个问题，上个世纪的顶尖技术专家们制造出一堆新的问题。其中当然就有基本的安全隐患。信息时代的典型特征是数据可以迅速、便宜地进行交换，这为黑客和网络恐怖分子提供了很多侵犯隐私的可乘之机，自称为无名氏的活跃黑客纷纷崛起。

    还有就是电子邮件泛滥之殇。不断出现的新工具能帮助我了解我关心的重要信息，更高效地消化更多信息。但与此同时，绝大多数这类工具也让电邮泛滥的问题进一步恶化。

    社交网络就是个绝佳的例子。很多社交网络试图让用户在社交情境中开展沟通，从而自然地过滤掉那些不太重要的信息。然而，我们周遭的世界尚未齐刷刷地抛弃电邮，转投社交网络的怀抱，一如我们曾经抛弃固话、改用手机那样。除非一种通讯工具被所有人采纳并成为文化规范，否则它就毫无用处，因为使用者不确信对方到底能不能接收到自己的信息。正因为如此，社交网络更像是娱乐杂志的电子版，而其推送电邮——比如什么“马特•维拉正在Kickstarter（美国创意筹资网站——译注）上关注你”，“埃文•亨佩尔希望你加入他在商务社交网站LinkedIn上的圈子”之类——只会让垃圾电邮愈发泛滥。

    难道是我们的终极目标错了吗？毕竟大多说这类服务的宗旨是帮我们消化来自更多人、有关更多话题的更大量信息。二十年前，英国人类学家罗宾•顿巴在研究了猴群内部的社会关系，并比照大脑尺寸绘制了这些信息后得出了一个理论，人类实际能掌控的交际人数最多只有150人。如果和硅谷的创业家聊起这个话题，他们往往会向你展示他们的服务能如何帮助你超越这个所谓的“顿巴数”，也就是帮你掌控大大超过150人的交往人数。这个目标正确吗？或者，我们是不是应该把精力放在如何限制沟通，转而培养并加深入、更少数量的人际关系上呢？

    对于信息爆炸导致的这些问题我难以解答（我连收件箱里1,379封邮件都没法读完，怎么可能有时间思考这个问题呢？），但是本世纪围绕通讯进行的创新绝大多数似乎都增加了通讯的手段，它们放大了20世纪所取得的最伟大的成就，使信息量更加丰富，但却并不更有益处。

    我觉得，一个信息量超载不可承受之重的时刻即将来临。我们身边都有那么一些人拒绝使用Facebook，很少在网络上抛头露面，也不依赖大家都在用的社交平台，但我们绝大多数人都不会这么不随大流。我们过于害怕自己会错过一些重要的东西。于是我们给自己放个“数字休假”，希望某个地方的某个人突然会想出个绝妙的主意，解决21世纪最重大的信息难题。

    译者：清远

    This month I went off the grid -- all the way off. I powered my iPhone down, popped the vacation responder on my email, and headed out for a two-week adventure. By day two, I had stopped reflexively reaching for my phone; after a week, I could read a book for more than an hour at a time. Then I came home to a sobering reality: 1,379 messages in my Inbox.

    And that was just work email.

    I'm not as important as my voluminous Inbox would have you believe me to be, nor am I all that unique. Chances are you have this problem, too. And it seems to be getting a lot worse. Unlike past years, when people checked in occasionally from summer vacation destinations, this year digital sabbaticals were in vogue. (Social media researcher Danah Boyd even published a "how-to" on the topic.) As one friend's "away" message read: "I'm unplugged from 8/5-8/20. I won't be responding to e-mail." None of this occasional checking in -- this summer we needed a real break.

    But this is not another rant against email. Email is magic. It enables abundant, free communication. Consider how far we have come in less than a century: In 1915 -- the year my grandfather was born -- Alexander Graham Bell picked up a telephone in New York and made the country's first transcontinental call to San Francisco. Adjusting for inflation, the price of a 3-minute call back then was $440. Today, I video chat through my Gmail account with friends in Budapest or Tokyo -- for free. Seriously, magic.

    Rather, this is a call for innovation. This detail about the telephone came from Jon Gertner's The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation, which was easily the most important book I read in 2012. Gertner identifies communications as the largest challenge the American economy had to confront in the 20th century, and he vividly describes the formula for innovation that Bell Labs pioneered.

    In his historical account of the rise of Bell Labs, a discerning reader will recognize many of the elements -- collaborative heterogeneous teams, free time to work on personal projects -- that have become staples in Silicon Valley's most innovative companies. But the thought I'm left contemplating months after completing the book is raised in the final chapter: "Has access to information not only expanded our lives, but contracted them?" Gertner asks.

    Put simply, in the race to solve one problem, the last century's greatest technologists created a host of new ones. There are, of course, basic security concerns. The information age -- in particular, the quick and inexpensive exchange of data -- presents opportunities for the violation of privacy and exposes societies to vulnerabilities that can be exploited by hackers and cyberterrorists. Witness the rise of the group of activist-hackers who call themselves Anonymous.

    And then there's the problem of my email box. New tools are constantly being invented to help me to see the information that matters to me, and to digest more information more efficiently. But so far, most of those tools make this particular problem worse.

    Social networks are a perfect example. Many have attempted to lend social context to communication, helping us naturally to filter out what is less important. But our culture has not yet abandoned emails en masse for social networks in the way that we abandoned landlines, for example, in favor of cell phones. Unless a communications tool is adopted by everyone, becoming the cultural norm, it is useless because users can't trust their messages will be received. Thus social networks feel more like the digital versions of entertainment magazines and their email prompts -- "Matt Vella is following you on Kickstarter" and "Evan Hempel wants you to join his network on LinkedIn" -- add to the email problem.

    Could it be that our end goal is wrong? Most of these services are focused on helping us digest more -- more information on more topics coming from more people. Two decades ago British anthropologist Robin Dunbar studied the social connections in groups of monkeys and mapped this information to brain size to come up with a theory that the maximum number of relationships a human being can realistically manage is 150. Talk to Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and they'll often demonstrate how their services can help you game "the Dunbar number," as it is called, nursing far more than 150 relationships. Is this the right objective? Or should we instead be focusing on how to limit communication, to nurture and deepen a smaller number of relationships?

    I don't have an answer for the problems that information presents (how could I possibly have time to think about it when I haven't yet been able to get through the 1,379 emails in my Inbox?), but it seems that most of the innovation around communications in this century has been of the incremental variety. It has amplified the greatest achievements of the 20th century, making information more abundant but not more useful.

    I sense we are reaching a moment of maximum overload. We all know people who are Facebook refusers, who keep low digital profiles and aren't reliable on the common platforms, but most of us would never bow out entirely. We're too afraid we'd miss something important. Instead, we arrange to take our digital sabbaticals in hopes that for someone, somewhere, a big idea—the solution to the 21st century's biggest information problem--will emerge.