Little Swarming Gnats of Data

Here’s a screenshot of my inbox from when I was on the last leg of my flight home from family summer vacation:

Screenshot of the Mail app on iOS where the screen is completely full of messages from United Airlines.

That’s pretty representative of the flurry of emails I get when I fly, e.g.:

In addition to email, the airline has my mobile number and I have its app, so a large portion of my email notifications are also sent as 1) push notifications to my devices, as well as 2) messages to my mobile phone number.

So when the plane begins boarding, for example, I’m told about it with an email, a text, and a push notification.

I put up with it because I’ve tried pruning my stream of notifications from the airlines in the past, only to lose out on a vital notification about a change or delay. It feels like my two options are:

  1. Get all notifications multiple times via email, text, and in-app push.
  2. Get most notifications via one channel, but somehow miss the most vital one.

All of this serendipitously coincided with me reading a recent piece from Nicholas Carr where he described these kinds of notifications as “little data”:

all those fleeting, discrete bits of information that swarm around us like gnats on a humid summer evening.

That feels apt, as I find myself swiping at lots of little data gnats swarming in my email, message, and notification inboxes.

No wondering they call it “fly”ing 🥁