Last Tuesday I had a drink over at my neighbor’s house and
saw that they had their television set to Obamas State of the Union Address. I
offered to come back later or listen to it with them. We ended up chatting while there was a long
segment of congress people and senators walking into the room and greeting each
other and by the time I left the President had only just started speaking. I
thought to myself, that they should have started the program and timed it to
start with the actual address.
I was little surprised when the next day a poll showed that
most viewers didn’t stay on the channel long enough to listen to the
speech. Of course not! We have 8 (!) seconds (!) in a YouTube video
to engage our audience, then they’re gone.
TV shows might get a whopping 90 seconds.
There are too many things tugging at our sleeve to pay
attention to things at length anymore and I’m not talking about children or
attention seeking pets and husbands.
When I try to settle into a longer article I actually get a bit jumpy
and page to the back to see how long my commitments is going to be and if I
want to even start to engage. Books for
fun (and I used to be a voracious reader) have been relegated to the vacation
back burner and even then I have to make a time commitment to read a few
books.
The other day I heard an interview on TV (while I was either
cooking, exercising or cleaning up social emails) where Tom Brokaw (I think) was
talking about a new book and said, that today it’s not enough anymore to read
the local newspaper and a few trade magazines and listen to the radio on the
way to work and watch the evening news.
We ALSO need to plow through a plethora, or should I say onslaught of
information form the net.
I WISH I had time to do all the things Tom Brokaw listed –
I’m glad if I manage the New York Times and my Swiss weekly newspaper and the
morning news. The blogs I subscribe to get a quick glance and I have an ever
growing list of blog entries I have to read, I WANT to red, but oh, so little
time.
We thought reading and writing was dead! Social media has
changed that to a certain extent; even if the social media prose is not what we
(old people) learned in school. I’m reading a New Yorker article (yes, I know)
about the kid that was spied on by his roommate in college and committed
suicide after the roommate blasted the internet with the news that he was gay
and showed video of him engaging with another man. The article shows excerpts from the texts
that went back and forth between these college freshmen and their friends. I’m
reading “IDC”, what? IDC? I don’t
care. My favorite was that the article
was full of “WTF”. We can now officially
use the “F” bomb in a reputable magazine because it’s not spelled out, just
WFT. But, I digress.
So, where does this leave us? In a world where we need to be
ever more expert at what we do and retreat into a smaller niches to then find
out that we have kinda lost the bigger picture (think onion peel) of your work
world, your kids world, your community world, your country world and let’s not
forget, art, literature, the latest food fad and the newest technological
advances, what your phone can REALLY do and you had no clue? This morning on the news (NY1): the app is dwindling. Today the average user uses less than five
apps in a week. They didn’t say how much that’s down from before but my guess
is SIGNIFICANTLY. At some point we have
to do the dishes and get some work done.
I circle back to an earlier post on: Curation and the Human
Algorithm. I think curation of information will become ever more important
to help us manage knowledge without going under in a sea of distractions and inert
information.
How do YOU manage your information flow? How have your habits change since the first onslaught
of social media and blogging? Are you digging
out from under?
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