The information age. Hyper-connectedness. The freedom of information. Sound familiar? Could be taken straight from a cloud computing brochure, or a social media strategist pitch, right? The internet has enabled information (or, at least, data) to flow faster, freer and further than ever before in human history...what a great invention it is!
Most of the time.
But what about when you don't want to know? What about when you're wanting to delay finding out a result so as to enjoy the surprise later on?
This dawned on me today as I was trying to not find out about the result of the first game in the NBA Conference finals. Given the timezone differences between NZ and the U.S., I had set my DVR to record the game, and was looking forward to getting home this evening and convincing my wife that watching the game is a worthwhile couples' activity. ;)
The challenge: how to not find out the score of the game throughout the course of the day.
In times gone by, this would have been as simple as not listening to the radio, nor looking at the headlines in the, heh, 'evening paper', and avoiding the news bulletin. The only slightly harder-to-manage wildcard would be your colleagues and friends, and getting someone who had already watched the game/event not to spoil it inadvertently by the water cooler.
Fast forward to the year 2012, and things become much harder. No news/radio/papers for a few hours? Easy. But in a world with Twitter and Facebook running the news business, you're looking at a self-imposed social media blackout (provided your job allows that) AND avoiding not one or two possible spolier workmates but, depending on the size and popularity of the event, all of your colleagues, friends and family who aren't running to the same schedule as you!
(If anyone with some Twitter client development skills is looking for an idea, how about a client where you can enter in some terms that you want to be embargoed for a period of time, and then it pro-actively filters out of your tweets any reference to 'Celtics', 'NBA', 'Heat' and 'win' or 'loss', for example.)
I thought I even had all the bases covered today. I chose to switch off Twitter and the like, and spoke to those in my team who follow basketball and warned of the dire consequences of disclosing the score.
Sorted, I thought.
Until my phone beeped a notification and I glanced at it automatically as I do...only to see the notification was from one of the sport apps I have installed helpfully informing me of the result of the game!
It seems to have come to a point where the tables have turned, and not getting results and information live is more effort than getting them live!
I know, I know - talk about your first-world problems. In the grand scheme of things, this isn't that important. However, how often do you hear 'surprise' and 'delight' mentioned next to each other? With genuine surprise under constant threat and attack by tweets, status updates and notification banners, what delight is being lost as collateral damage?