MaestroJ - digital strategy & new media

I moved house recently and this caused a week long wait while my ISP transferred my internet service to the new location.  During this time, I felt listless, disorganised, anxious and irritated. I felt cut off and isolated, like I was missing out on so many events and valuable information during this downtime. Of course I managed to sneak into an internet café at least once a day, but the pain of not being online and having access in real-time was almost unbearable. But once I accepted that I would have to wait a week, a more interesting side effect emerged; I felt like I had more time to ponder; I started thinking about why I felt this malaise just by not being online, I wondered about how much valuable and useful information I was actually missing out on. The answer I came up with was: probably only very little.

Information overload as a concept has been around for many, many years now. The earliest reference can actually be traced back to French philosopher Diderot in the 18th century – where he feared that the proliferation of books will interfere with learning through nature.

Social networks are probably some of the obvious contemporary culprits for information overload. Twitter, in particular, has taken it to a whole new level, just take a look at the Twitter public timeline to see a barrage of real-time inanities that fill people’s lives. Who needs to know about all that? There have been claims that Twitter users have short attention spans, displayed by the low user retention rate it actually has. The constant interruption that social networks can provide can be quite detrimental to our productivity. On any given day, think about the ratio between interruptions (which can include IM, emails, Twitter, Facebook, Google Reader list, RSS feed updates) and actual work you get done – are you happy with the answer?

Linda Stone is a writer who coined the term “Continuous Partial Attention” which provides a great description of the always on condition:

“To pay continuous partial attention is to pay partial attention — CONTINUOUSLY. It is motivated by a desire to be a LIVE node on the network. Another way of saying this is that we want to connect and be connected. We want to effectively scan for opportunity and optimize for the best opportunities, activities, and contacts, in any given moment. To be busy, to be connected, is to be alive, to be recognized, and to matter.

We pay continuous partial attention in an effort NOT TO MISS ANYTHING. It is an always-on, anywhere, anytime, any place behavior that involves an artificial sense of constant crisis. We are always in high alert when we pay continuous partial attention. This artificial sense of constant crisis is more typical of continuous partial attention than it is of multi-tasking.”

We can all recognise that to get substantial work done, a certain level of concentration is required, of uninterrupted time to pass. John Steel, a favourite author and long-time ad-man, wrote about the concept of “leaving it overnight” – that is, allowing your brain to process ideas overnight, and having a formulated resolution the following day. There are many terms for it; “cutting yourself off”, “me time”, “getting in the zone”. The necessary ingredient is of course, focus and attention, of being uninterrupted.

This is not about rubbishing social networks, far from it. I couldn’t be a bigger fan, and my work specialises in them. It’s about recognising the need to organise the sources of information you have, having a quality vs. quantity mentality (one only need to look at many Twitter “power” users to see the overemphasis on follower counts) and knowing that sometimes, to do your best work, you just need to turn off.

How many social networks are you active in? (I define active as logging on at least once a week, but you can have your own definition), vote below: