Social media’s content demand is driving me nuts! (Well ok, it is my drive that drives me mad).
Although I have been limiting my content output (mainly blog) I still have a drowning feeling. I limit my feedreading to two times a week and even that demands more time than I would wish it to take. But as a knowledge worker I have the feeling that I must learn, read, write, share and learn again.
Due to the content overload I have a tendency to read diagonally, but this speeds up my brain and in all honesty I am no rain man; if I do not read something carefully or I do not reread after a set amount of time, I just forget it. I started of as a member of the MTV generation and I am quickly growing into the SoMe-generation (= Social Media generation). This is affecting me more than I could have imagined at the beginning of my increased social media presence. Because although I have felt a great push forward in my knowledge at the same time I am increasingly aware of the shortened attention span. And however short I make it, it will never allow me to keep on top of all the content that is out there. The Greeks new it Panta Rei, but it starts to flow a bit too much for my brain.
So to overcome this information overload I have limited my feedreading, limited my social media tools, put a target on the amount of posts I want to write and limited my commenting urge (despite the SoMe angst that gave me). Still it does not do the trick, so I surfed (a the cause of all this overload) and found some kindred spirits with great suggestions and thoughts:
Alexander Van Elsas talks about the unlimited power off social media that is bound by human limitations.
Rob May who wrote an ironic article about it a year ago (What a year ago? That’s old man!) and he makes a very valuable remark on the benefit of long term growth.
Hutch Carpenter with a few nice pointers.
Erick Schonfeld from Techcrunch was overloaded with a new social media and puts his hopes into much talked about web3.0, but do I really want computers (or humans) to arrange/censor the content I am looking for with the argument of ranking, knowledge algorithms and so on? (let me confess… by the time web3.0 is coming, I will definitely be ready to accept this)
The image: I want to keep an open mind for enlightening signals of information, but at the same time keep the overload of superfluous information out… that is not easy. There is a comic strip that I really love: ‘Signal to Noise’ by Neil Gaiman and Dave McKein. I did not fully get it a couple of years ago, but everytime I read it it grows on me.
aha! we must exchange IRL libraries :-D
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