CreativITy

Now everybody is permanently "online" even if she has not netbook or iPad in her lap there is at least a mobile phone in her pocket. These devices flood as with information and keep interrupting our activities. This kind of multitasking is not a problem for computers but it's for humans. We people suffer from multitasking; being permanently interrupted is very energy consuming and destroys our thinking. We are forced to adapt to computers and not computers are adapting to us. So at the end we don't have the control about our own thinking. All this is described very impressive in Payback by Frank Schirrmacher. He brings the discussion of the new level and also gives some ideas about solving this problem. Computers will stay with as so we have to live up to challenge and make use of them not being used by them.

Schirrmacher doesn't give us the ready made solution but has some good ideas which I try to summarize and explain here.

• Free will. We have to accept that our capabilities are limited and consciously resign to getting after every piece of information. This could free our brain on concentrating on that what is important for us. During the history the existence of the free will has been constantly being debated. However believing in free will rather than in computerized prediction makes us free in the positive sense.
• Modeling. We asses and evaluate the reality through modeling. Internet, aka Google is increasingly able to predict events through statistical analysis. And promises that we won't need any models on our own in the future. However statistical analysis is not the only model in the world. What is more, we humans have the ability to work with incomplete data and even bend the reality towards our favor. We should keep this ability.
• Perspective. The computer has only one perspective and its always "perfect". Creative humans can see things from different perspectives and changes them. This is where ideas born and this is way we are able create new artifacts from existing ones. 
• Impatience and eagerness to do thing better than before and never be fully content.

The interesting these statements is that they almost put the matter into a religious context, but I don't want to go further into this direction.  Schirrmacher uses a very good metaphor to describe our situation. We are like hunters as our predecessor were for hundreds of  thousands years. And we are still like hunters but now we hunt for information rather than for pray. 

Hunters instincts served us well till the end of the eighties. I still remember how difficult it was to collect information about topics which I now can find in two minutes in Wikipedia.

And now imagine a hunter which is flooded with pray. However in the flood of tracks and scents he is hardly able to decide which one to catch. All of them seems to be a good catch but every one takes his time, concentration and energy. So he may spend all his time with catching something which has no value or even dangerous.

What could we - as information providers and information technology managers - do. We can use fine recommender system which helps to find the relevant information. However - it seems - in such a way we help to deal with the information overload but on the other hand we destroy creative thinking. We need something even better.

We would need something which support creativity. Which delivers surprising information (however what is not surprising is not a real information) and can be surprised. Lets to broaden and narrow focus alternatively. (See Csikszentmihalyi about creativity).

How could such a system s look like? Narrowing and broadening focus can be done and e.g Ask does it fairly well. The bad new is that Ask is not the most popular search engine. Maybe this can be improved.

Google has a surprise function ("I'm feeling lucky"). I could imagine a function which combines the surprise and perspective change. (In one direction giving me more surprises and more "exact" results in the other direction.)

I also would like a way to surprise Google or my ERP system. But surprise is in emotion and - so it seems - the only emotion computers have to brake down or produce other types of errors. What would be if I ask something (e.g. which car should I buy) and the system will admit that he doesn't know the right answer, but would refer me to better sources or other people who have the same problem. In such a way maybe we would start asking better questions and helping the guys at Google and give ourselves an opportunity to develop. And maintain our autonomy and independence at the end.