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Micah December 23rd

Why is Faster Better?

I have been thinking about this topic for awhile, and I just cant get my thoughts to form a distinct logical line, so I think I might just stream of conscious this post.

The Real Time Web is something that has garnered a ton of interest this past year. It is clearly directly related to the growth of Twitter and the speed at which Twitter entered the main stream. It was almost as if all of us geeks and nerds went “Holy crap! The masses love something we created! Why? Well, its ‘real time,’ so that much be it!”

Then everything started becoming real time. Search, news, communication. Even location. Venture money started pouring into (most) any startup that could claim a real time component to their product offering. Even Google jumped the real time shark, and launched Google Wave (real time collaboration).

But is real time good? Does it make live better?

When I was interviewing at ServiceMagic in 2001, I was asked “What is the purpose of the internet?” At the time, it was almost like having to ponder the meaning of life. “I dunno,” I replied. “But for me its about the facilitation of communication and information.”

Its all about speed. How quickly can a message get from point A to point B.

We marvel at how news “breaks” on twitter before mainstream news. We are amazed at the ability of information to flow outside of normal channels like it did during the Iranian elections. We pat ourselves on the back for being FIRST!!!!!! and continue to tout how great real time is and will become.

The standard paradigm of a message is that there is a sender, a receiver and a pile of interference between the two. Just like the game of operator.

Speed doesnt reduce the interference, but it does reduce our natural awareness of interference. We care less, because the information got to us faster.

Its about WHEN we got the news, not about the ACCURACY of the news. ACCURACY can be corrected at a later date, but time cant change.

So why do we love real time, when in many occasions a bit of a slower web is actually more beneficial? We are geeks and nerds. We love numbers and data. We are problem solvers and thinkers. We want multiple unfiltered inputs so that we can apply our own internal filters and come to our own conclusions. We want information and communication to be free, so that we can apply our own thoughts, assumptions and come up with our own conclusions.

We are free thinkers.

But does that make real time good? Is faster better?

Most of us, regardless of our belief to synthesize information, are actually benefited by having information and (some) communication pre-filtered. Most of us, are benefited by the ability to absorb and ponder the information and communication we are given prior to response or developing a conclusion.

Real time in many cases reduces our ability to properly evaluate the information we are provided, and we end up making poor decisions and/or conclusions.

Its like my favorite parable:

Two bulls are sitting on a hill overlooking a valley of cows.
The young bull says to the old bull, “lets run down there and screw us a cow!”
The old bull says, “lets walk down there and screw them all.”

Its like the young bull is now the Real Time bull. Speed is not always king, and the greatest ability we will develop is an understanding of that and when real time is actually a failure.

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  • http://lizwiltsie.com Wiltsie

    I don't agree that slower is necessarily more accurate. I feel similarly about real-time as I do about Wikipedia (post about Wikipedia here:http://lizwiltsie.com/2009/06/22/wikipedia-and-the-truth/). Basically, we don't expect real-time to be perfect, and we are more skeptical of that information. Skeptical is good.

    I totally agree with your assessment of why real-time fascinates us though.

  • http://learntoduck.com micah

    I disagree. I think many people assume the information to be accurate,
    especially as the source is more trusted, which is one of the difficulties
    with twitter and the concept of ambient intimacy.

  • http://lizwiltsie.com Wiltsie

    Is trusting a proven source on Twitter different than trusting a proven media source? I guess I have very little faith in mainstream media in general. Or are we talking about unproven sources on Twitter?

  • http://www.facebook.com/johnrichardfischer John Fischer

    Faster is better when it comes to technology but too many of us are falling into a trap of trying to run our lives as fast as our tech, getting the two intertwined….. so I leave with a quote from Mohandas Gandhi, “There is more to life than increasing its speed.”

  • http://twitter.com/Merredith Merredith

    I'm glad you wrote this; I think about this a lot, and the subject comes up often in the context of “old” vs. “new” media, which automatically aligns people into camps — and so ignores the larger point. Accuracy, analysis, and multiple even opposing sources of information can give us ways to understand and possibly to react better — at least sometimes. Did you ever read “The Book of Laughter and Forgetting?” — Milan Kundera noted that as communication improved, history itself seemed to accelerate. Scholars and the common man used to take time to digest an event, but with improved communications, the *next* event would be upon us, and we would forget the previous one.

    It feels like real-time could be more of the same… just even faster.

    Thanks for writing this post, it deserves a big audience.

  • http://learntoduck.com micah

    I havent read that book, but it make sense. Its just seems that we have
    become a society/economy of easy and now, and we will be ok with mistakes
    and blunders as long as its easy and now. There is something not right about
    it all, and I am still not sure I know exactly what it is. But, I do know
    that parts of the real time web are here to stay, but that a backlash has to
    be coming. There needs to be an event that pushing things to an equilibrium.

  • http://blog.tomhigley.com tomhigley

    Years ago, when I was doing one of my first startups, I had a phone conversation with an older friend and angel investor in one of my companies. This is the guy who wrote the check that made him my first angel investor. At the time, tech was on a tear. Internet companies were springing up everywhere. I was traveling constantly. I was using every new electronic device and toy, each new app I could find to reduce the time it took me to do X, where X pretty much stands for anything I had to do or accomplish. It felt like I was moving faster (and seeing a little bit farther) than almost anyone I knew. Back to my friend, the angel investor. In this particular conversation, it felt to me like he was speaking in slow motion. I was four steps ahead of each word he spoke. I waited a week for each sentence. And suddenly, I heard myself speaking to him impatiently, without the respect an appreciation he deserved.

    Yesterday, I was listening to the audio of a YouTube video as I drove to the airport. A police cruiser, flashing its red and blue lights, pulled me over. The officer who came to the window pointed out that my entire driving record was visible. And every entry said “speed.” He gave me a warning and asked me when I was going to deal with “the problem.”

    These things are connected. Faster isn't better or worse. Newer isn't better or worse. But faster and newer can exert such a powerful influence over how we think, act, speak, etc., that we often embrace them as intrinsically superior to slower and older. It's almost always a good thing to stop, from time-to-time, and reassess the underlying drivers of our thoughts and behavior.

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