Life Is Perceived As Faster Says Science
November 20, 2015
I read a spider friendly, link baitable article in a UK newspaper. You love these folks because each page view downloads lots and lots of code, ads, trackers, etc.
The story was “Can’t Believe It’s Almost Christmas? Technology Is Speeding Up Our Perception of Time, Researchers Say.” Heck of a title in my opinion.
The main point is captured in this quote from Wizard McLoughlin:
long monologue from a ‘real’ book.
‘It’s almost as though we’re trying to emulate the technology and be speedier and more efficient. It seems like there’s something about technology itself that primes us to increase that pacemaker inside of us that measures the passing of time.”
The “it” I assume means the way the modern world works.
I think the idea is valid. A good example is the behavior of search and content processing companies. Although many companies evidence the behaviors I want to identity, these quirks are most evident among the search and content processing outfits which have ingested tens of millions in venture funding.
The time pressure comes from the thought process like this statement which I recall from my reading of Samuel Johnson:
Nothing focuses the mind like a hanging.
The search and processing vendors under the most pressure appear to be taking the following actions. These comments apply to Attivio, BA Insight ,Coveo, and Lucidworks-type companies. The craziness of IBM Watson and HP Autonomy in the cloud may have other protein triggers.
Here we go:
- Big data. How can outfits which struggle to update indexes and process new and changed content handle Big Data? It is just trendy to call a company like Vivisimo a Big Data firm than try to explain that key word search has “real” value.
- Customer support. I don’t know about you, but I avoid customer support. Customer support means stupid telephone selections, dorky music, reminders that the call is being monitored for “quality purposes”, and other cost cutting, don’t-bother-us approaches. Where search and content processing fits in has little to do with customer service and everything about cost reduction.
- Analytics. Yep, indexing systems can output a list of the number of times a word appears in a document, a batch, or a time period. These items can be counted and converted to a graph. But I do not think that enterprise search systems are analytics systems. Again. If it helps close a deal, go with it.
- Business intelligence. I like this one. The idea that a person can look for the name of a person, place, or thing provides intelligence is laughable. I also get a kick out selective dissemination functions or standing queries presented as a magical window on real time data. Baloney. Intelligence is not a variation of search and content processing. Search and content processing are utility functions within a larger more comprehensive systems. Check out NetReveal and let me know how close an enterprise search vendor comes to this BAE Systems’ service.
When will enterprise search and content processing vendors alter their marketing?
Not until their stakeholders are able to sell these outfits and move on to less crazy investments.
The craziness will persist because the time available to hit their numbers is dwindling. Fiddling with mobile devices and getting distracted by shiny bits just makes the silliness more likely.
Have you purchased a gift using Watson’s app? Have you added a Watson recipe to your holiday menu? Have you used a metasearch system like Vivisimo to solve your Big Data problems? Have you embraced Solr as a way to make Hadoop data repositories cornucopias of wisdom?
Right. The stuff may not work as one hopes. Time is running out. Quickly in real time and in imagined time.
Stephen E Arnold, November 20, 2015
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Life Is Perceived As Faster Says Science : Stephen E. Arnold @ Beyond Search