My background is in analysis. Most recently I was a “trends consultant” for the innovation consultancy PSFK, before that I was called an “account planner” doing consumer research in ad agencies, and before that I was an “intelligence analyst” for what the US military calls INSCOM, the United States Intelligence and Security Command.
The common thread has always been: collect a bunch of information over time, organize it, and use it to tell a story.
I call this analysis. It’s a process of looking at and understanding a set of information, but it’s more critically a process of first cultivating and organizing that information in productive ways.The information you cultivate impacts your future thinking. At some point absorbing, filtering, and classifying information just became so much part of my daily life that I naturally overlooked the fact that it’s not something people spend a lot of time thinking about. Sure, there were times when my insistence on properly organizing incoming information would spill over into the real world and people would look at me funny for wanting the toothpaste in certain places, but those were easy to dismiss as just silly quirks. I would notice people’s frustrations with dealing with increasingly more information in an increasingly complex world. New social networks to be a part of. Friend requests to respond to. Notifications to process. Thousands of MUST-READ articles, marked as unread in their RSS readers. Instapapered and DVR’d content never quite consumed. New apps to try.Then, people started to take note of a case Eli Pariser was making, about what he calls The Filter Bubble. He makes a good case that the information you cultivate impacts your future thinking. People now started to realize that there’s something very important in understanding how they process information - something bigger than just Fear Of Missing Out. Because of my background I’ve spent a long time consuming, processing, and organizing information. So I've come to a sort of “information theory” I think is potentially useful for anyone trying to better access how information fits into their lives, and how to organize it. How to use it efficiently. Less a set of instructions, and more of a conceptual framework that one can use to strategically understand how one person’s "essential" headline professing untold wisdom is another person’s small piece of data to be aggregated alongside more of the same. And more practically: how to understand change over time and identify the direction of innovation. And there are some other big filter geeks and trends thinkers who have helped me calibrate this thinking along the way. I want to bring all of this thinking together in a form where the everyday information worker can develop the tools necessary to better navigate their worlds of data.This may take the shape of a book, but there are a lot of questions I want to address with answers that are likely non-book in nature. As this gets worked out, I’ll be tagging the pieces of that final work here under the tag Filter Theory. I’m looking forward to it developing - and if you’re feeling inspired to share a thought, I welcome the contribution to making this work better help others.
The common thread has always been: collect a bunch of information over time, organize it, and use it to tell a story.
I call this analysis. It’s a process of looking at and understanding a set of information, but it’s more critically a process of first cultivating and organizing that information in productive ways.The information you cultivate impacts your future thinking. At some point absorbing, filtering, and classifying information just became so much part of my daily life that I naturally overlooked the fact that it’s not something people spend a lot of time thinking about. Sure, there were times when my insistence on properly organizing incoming information would spill over into the real world and people would look at me funny for wanting the toothpaste in certain places, but those were easy to dismiss as just silly quirks. I would notice people’s frustrations with dealing with increasingly more information in an increasingly complex world. New social networks to be a part of. Friend requests to respond to. Notifications to process. Thousands of MUST-READ articles, marked as unread in their RSS readers. Instapapered and DVR’d content never quite consumed. New apps to try.Then, people started to take note of a case Eli Pariser was making, about what he calls The Filter Bubble. He makes a good case that the information you cultivate impacts your future thinking. People now started to realize that there’s something very important in understanding how they process information - something bigger than just Fear Of Missing Out. Because of my background I’ve spent a long time consuming, processing, and organizing information. So I've come to a sort of “information theory” I think is potentially useful for anyone trying to better access how information fits into their lives, and how to organize it. How to use it efficiently. Less a set of instructions, and more of a conceptual framework that one can use to strategically understand how one person’s "essential" headline professing untold wisdom is another person’s small piece of data to be aggregated alongside more of the same. And more practically: how to understand change over time and identify the direction of innovation. And there are some other big filter geeks and trends thinkers who have helped me calibrate this thinking along the way. I want to bring all of this thinking together in a form where the everyday information worker can develop the tools necessary to better navigate their worlds of data.This may take the shape of a book, but there are a lot of questions I want to address with answers that are likely non-book in nature. As this gets worked out, I’ll be tagging the pieces of that final work here under the tag Filter Theory. I’m looking forward to it developing - and if you’re feeling inspired to share a thought, I welcome the contribution to making this work better help others.
