When push comes to shove

Anyone who promotes a product as a killer application is either dim or desperate because the whole point about a killer app is that it's difficult to predict.

Did anyone predict that a spreadsheet called VisiCalc would guarantee the success of the PC? Or that sales of TV sets would be pushed through the roof by the Coronation (Her Majesty's, not the Street, that is)? Probably not. It just happened, and afterwards people with 20/20 hindsight said: 'Aha! The killer application.'

So when a brochure for a hi-tech conference dropped on my low-tech doormat, I was relieved to read that 'push technology is the next killer intranet application'. Because I don't like being pushed around, and obviously if push is being touted as the next killer app, it's going to die a quick and quiet death. Until push arrived, I had the perfect solution to the problem of information overload - complete ignorance. I know I shall never know everything, and reasoning that half the picture is more dangerous than nothing, I have kept my mind unsullied by fact or opinion. (This incidentally, equips me perfectly for my role as a columnist).

Push, by contrast, promises partial ignorance, masquerading as knowledge, empowerment and a swarm of other buzzwords. There will still be far more information out there than I could ever make sense of, so all push will do is make me narrow-minded and blinkered. It's some consolation to know that I can adjust the blinkers myself so that - if you'll forgive the mixed metaphor - I shall be able to retreat behind personalised rose-tinted spectacles, smugly ignorant of any subject which I didn't think to tap into my search engine. But I shan't be any more knowledgeable, empowered or otherwise buzzworded.

The idea of some 24-hour intranet server pushing news stories, press releases and other gobbets of information into my virtual craw frankly does not appeal. I like the rather haphazard way that information reaches me now - including conference brochures which slip unbidden through my letter box and spur me to write articles like this.

At least I'm my own boss. It must be even worse for employees, with a whole corporation pushing gobbets at them. The brochure went on to crow that push 'gives employees access to important information which can then increase productivity'. No doubt in the form of a program which monitors the sales database and emails them to say 'either you make another #10,000 this afternoon, or you're fired'. The real problem of information overload is not ignorance itself, but the guilt it inspires, the conviction that you are missing something vital.

Push will probably not find it for you - after all, you don't even know what the something vital is, so how can you add it to your search criteria?

But it will ensure that, if you still don't know it, it will now be your fault. So next time someone tries to flog you a killer application, just tell them to push off.

Paul Bray is a freelance IT journalist.