page197
the future of iGNoriNG thiNGs
175
The Future of Ignoring Things
(Originally published on
InformationWeek
’s Internet Evolution [
www.
internetevolution.com
], October 3, 2007.)
For decades, computers have been helping us to remember, but
now it’s time for them to help us to ignore.
Take email: Endless engineer-hours are poured into stopping
spam, but virtually no attention is paid to our interaction with
our non-spam messages. Our mailer may strive to learn from
our ratings what is and is not spam, but it expends practically no
effort on figuring out which of the non-spam emails are impor-
tant and which ones can be safely ignored, dropped into archival
folders, or deleted unread.
For example, I’m forever getting cc’d on busy threads by well-
meaning colleagues who want to loop me in on some discussion
in which I have little interest. Maybe the initial group invitation
to a dinner (that I’ll be out of town for) was something I needed
to see, but now that I’ve declined, I really don’t need to read the
300+ messages that follow debating the best place to eat.
I could write a mail-rule to ignore the thread, of course. But
mail-rule editors are clunky, and once your rule-list grows very
long, it becomes increasingly unmanageable. Mail-rules are where
bookmarks were before the bookmark site del.icio.us showed up
— built for people who might want to ensure that messages from
the boss show up in red, but not intended to be used as a gigantic
storehouse of a million filters, a crude means for telling the com-
puters what we don’t want to see.
175
Content 2nd gal final.indd 175
7/4/08 9:57:30 AM