Dear Romie,
The recent post titled "Back in the Temple of Uruk" was a playful
request for courtesy in reposting the content of past posts. The
style was playful. The request was serious. Carelessly repeated
headers, footers, forwarding arrows, and nested passages of clutter
make clumsy notes and cluttered lists.
Romie Littrell wrote, "My bandwidth is cheaper than my time," adding,
"Perhaps some of us haven't set our browsers to display the new
message above the old, though I haven't seen this on this list."
This response overlooks social, economic, and technical issues.
The social issues involve communication tone and style.
A thoughtful person takes the time to write well. Good writing
involves style and format, habits of mind and the social environment
one creates by writing. The tone and style of our posting creates the
contextual community of our discussion group.
The second issue involves the economic value of time.
Measuring the cost of one writer's time against the cost of bandwidth
is irrelevant. The meaningful measure balances an author's time
against the aggregate time of other list subscribers.
The major cost of a discussion list message is not measured in
writing time. It is measured in reading and handling time multiplied
by the number of readers. To determine cost, time must be multiplied
by the value of reader attention.
As of this morning, Mg-Ed-Dv has 1,017 subscribers. It takes a few
seconds to determine that a reposted note is irrelevant, followed by
a decision to trash or scroll by. Let us give these five seconds. It
is less time for some, more for others. Those five seconds add up to
one hour and fifteen minutes invested by the professors, executives,
and consultants who subscribe. This time is more expensive than
bandwidth consumed.
The third fact is technical. Many of us subscribe in digest format.
Those of us who subscribe in digest must scroll by old messages to
get on to the next new message.
The fourth fact is also technical. Bandwidth consumption is modest in
its effect on any one individual, but massive in total. The bandwidth
required for transmitting needless information in any one post is
modest. Multiplied by thousands of daily transactions, however, this
bandwidth adds up. No one message seems to make a measurable
difference. However, these differences do make a difference in their
aggregate effect. If you run a content analysis of a list like this
and measure repeated messages against processing time, you would be
able to measure exactly how much money these repeated messages cost
the host of Mg-Ed-Dv.
Instead, however, let us consider the value - or cost -- of an
individual post to readers.
I use three measures for the value of a post. Two are quantitative.
One is qualitative. The quantitative measure is the ratio between
signal and noise.
The first quantitative measure is a form of content analysis. The
counting functions of a word processing program allow us to analyze a
post.
Each unit of new, purpose-written content counts as signal. Reading
the post converts signal into information. Once converted by the
reader, it has no further use. The second time the post appears, it
is noise. Each unit of repeated prior content is noise. The ratio of
new content to repeated content is the signal-to-noise ratio. In any
good communication, signal should be greater than noise.
The second quantitative measure involves information economics.
A repeated prior post contains no new information. Information
economics therefore makes it is easy to quantify the cost of a bad
post.
The second time the post appears, it is noise. Since there is no
signal left, a repeated post creates no value. Nevertheless, it
requires processing time. Information economics suggests that this
processing time is the cost of a repeated post.
Since there is no value creation associated with the cost of a
repeated post, this processing time measures destroyed value.
The third measure is qualitative. A thoughtful, well-constructed post
creates value for the 1,017 subscribers of Mg-Ed-Dv.
While it is hard to quantify the value of a good post, it creates
valuable information. This, in turn, creates some form of economic
value. While this economic value is difficult to measure, it is fair
to assume that the value created by a good post outweighs the cost of
information processing.
The value of a carefully edited, well-constructed note is greater
than the simple cost of the bandwidth.
Best regards,
Ken
--
Ken Friedman, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Leadership and Strategic Design
Department of Technology and Knowledge Management
Norwegian School of Management
Visiting Professor
Advanced Research Institute
School of Art and Design
Staffordshire University