Monthly Archives: March 2009

Friends Don’t Let Friend’s Over-Twitter

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I have been thinking about my Twitter post from yesterday. I think I need to clarify something. I do not believe there is something inherently ‘bad’ about the technology itself. And I do see opportunities for some utility. But to benefit from Twitter we have to use it in a manner that is balanced and personally responsible.

Being personally responsible with something novel and pleasurable is not common. In a sense, it’s like asking a college freshman to drink responsibly. Oh sure Mom, as your car drives off and you leave me on my own for the first time in my life, I will definitely only have one beer at the party on Tuesday night. (And Wednesday night, and Thursday night.)

Many of my peers have 500+ Facebook friends and follow hundreds of Twitterers. And as mentioned yesterday, in following less than 50 people I am finding it both distracting and impossible to ‘keep up’ with in any meaningful way. There’s an 80-20 rule to it too. A minority of the Twitterers I follow tweet ALL THE TIME. That’s where it gets difficult. Yet these serial Twitterers I follow are smart people and they have interesting insights – sometimes. But when its buried in with all the drivel, it’s hard to extract.

So in my opinion Twitter needs to be responsibly used from both ends. People tweeting should realize that tracking their 4th cup of coffee today isn’t really that interesting. Seriously, get over the banality of the moment and be worth while. Isn’t the whole hullabaloo about advertising being evil because it’s piped in noise about stuff that isn’t relevant? How is knowing you’re saddling up to your 4th latte this morning not the same thing?

On the other side, we have to be disciplined about how we connect here. Again, if you fit the ‘volunteer juror profile’ (see prior post) then I supposed it doesn’t really matter how much noise you let yourself be distracted by. But if you have something you need to do, and you allow yourself to be constantly distracted by 500 people chattering on and on about their latest sneeze to cough ratio then you’re undermining your own efforts. (And your employer, if s/he has a shred of intelligence, will realize money is being wasted on you.)

But it shouldn’t have to come to that. It shouldn’t fit the typical pattern whereby we culturally wait until it’s a problem to fix it. If it gets so bad that companies block Twitter with a firewall, then the utility is tossed out with the distractions. That’s unfortunate and avoidable.

Net, net, I’m adopting a more disciplined approach to Twitter. Like using email during the work day, I can’t have it auto-messaging me. There’s too much volume and frequency. It’s simply too distracting and I can’t be at my best when I’m distracted (the mighty myth of multitasking is just that, a myth). So I need to filter heavier when I’m working.

There it is again, filtering, the digital age’s a Achilles’ heel.

With incidences of ADHD (or at least the symptoms) seemingly increasing (linky, linky, linky) and parents and teachers yapping about kids’ lack of focus, and employers trying to do more with fewer people, and an economy on the skids… It seems to be there’s more value to being productive and focused than in entertaining myself with the banality of Twitter yap.

Wow, I sound like my father.

The question is, now that I’ve become accustom to the noise, when I turn it off, will the silence be deafening and distracting?

Twitter > Chatter > Noize

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skeetshootIs it me or is Twitter a little distracting and borderline annoying? I realize to keep up with the times – and particularly as Twitter is enjoying its tipping point – I am almost obligated to have a feed. I’m using Twitterific on my desktop and Twitterfon on my iPhone, which are both decent little apps. But that $*#&%$-ing bird on my desktop turns blue (indicating new activity) nearly every minute and I’m following less than 50 people.

So I check and 85% of the tweets are, well, not really worth the investigation. Another 5% are Tinyurl links to articles or blog posts or whatever. These are admittedly more useful. However, they’re not really urgent matters and so perhaps would’ve been better sent as emails which I can more easily go back through, organize into smart mailboxes, etc. etc.

Even the Tweets that entertain me, to which I reply back, are more distractions than anything. I break my train of thought on a matter I’m being paid to think about so I can comment on a friend’s quirky note – and the value of that is what?

Ultimately it feels like we’re all volunteering to SPAM each other. We’re signing up to increase our own A.D.D. And ironically, we’re volunteering to be broadcast at in a media that as supposed to be all about pulling information when we wanted it.

I’m sure this is all of great utility for people who fit the ‘jury duty volunteer profile’ (i.e. students, unemployed, retirees, etc. with nothing else to do). And I’m sure my comrades in the self-infatuated geekosphere remain convinced this is the going create a global, feel-good, Utopian,  kum-ba-yah where everyone benefits for 24-7-365 connectivity with all the glorious information flitting about.

I’m calling B.S. here.

Most of the information tweeted  delivers no value  other than to distract me from doing something that could provide value. We’re training ourselves to defocus and frankly I think it will not serve us well.

A second point is, if <50 people are hard to keep up with on Twitter without simply staring at the feed all the time, isn’t following hundreds sort of pointless? I mean really, how many people’s posts do we see? How can we sort out the useless from the useful? Aren’t we just transferring the old-media problem of too much noise, to a new medium where the noise producers are us?

Web 2.0 is falling prey to the same problems of Web 1.0. Poor filtration. There’s no shortage of information (and noise) but rather than making it easier to filter out, we all VOLUNTEER to make it harder by following every hiccup, potty break and daydream of hundreds of people to interrupt us all the time. We use things like Tweetdeck for ‘a simple, fast way to experience [the deluge of banality that is - editors note] Twitter.’ In fact Tweetdeck just keeps a bigger CNN ticker of useless crap in view all the time distracting me from what I am trying to do.

My prediction is that Twitter will run like SecondLife. It will have a tipping point then a drop off as thousands of new accounts hastily set up to find out what all the hype is about become dormant when people realize this is not adding much to their lives.

If it doesn’t and we all do immerse ourselves in a constant stream of distracting banal information then the Information Age once celebrated for making us all more productive, smarter, efficient, etc. will have ironically set us back in that regard.

But we may not care, because rather than invent something new or solve some problem or spend time in the company of friends and family, we can check in on one of our 6,587 best friends’ latest tweets about the terrific sandwich he just ate.

Thanks Dad

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So my father emailed me the video embedded below today. (Which in and of itself is a sign things are changing at all strata of society.) If you have 5min. it’s worth sitting through. A lot of interesting factoids. I am told Sony used it as a set up in a conference.

As I watched it, this video validated my assumptions about the pace of change in the world. I also got to thinking again about the concept of expertise that is so readily throw around these days. Sure, I understand it’s role in the selling process, in building confidence in decisions, etc.

But…

Can anyone really claim expertise when everything around us is moving this fast? Wouldn’t it make more sense to watch wide-eyed like a child and sponge up as much as possible?

Young children learn very quickly because they don’t let their assumptions and a sense of certainty get in their way. Everything is new to them. They (unknowingly) come across many disconfirming insights because they simply don’t have that many confirmed ones at an early age. And children (and their brains) adapt on the fly. It’s no accident young people take to new technologies fast than older people.

The older we grow the more we know. But we need to stay young at heart (and at brain) and continually update that information. I’ve mentioned recently that experience is very important and sometimes under appreciated in the high-tech end of industry.My point was that experience comes from mistake making which takes time to do thoroughly. In making mistakes we encounter unexpected results which are new experiences we can fold into our future decision making.

A related topic has apparently been muttered about recently at SXSW as ‘search vs. serendipity’ an inquiry into how digital media – because is it fully user controlled – can work against us in that it allows us to easily cocoon ourselves around confirming information. A recent  New York Times editorial column (thanks to Alan Wolk for pointing it out) also took on a similar slant.

Anyhow, I digress. The net, net of the video below is, things are changing fast (which we all knew, but the stats are fun to revisit now and then). If we really want to be experts on any of what’s going on, we have to make a conscious effort not to believe we’re experts. In doing so we free ourselves up to seek out the disconfirming information that broadens our horizons, updates our brains and allows us to make better decisions based on what’s happening here and now.


Be A Student of Errors

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Last night I was finishing How We Decide which is  the most useful book I’ve read in a while. Toward the end, the author was offering summary ideas on how to leverage the insights of the book. He dropped a single phrase, “Be a student of errors” which stuck with me.

In my experience with Aikido and as a martial arts instructor, the concept of being a student of errors is a familiar one. It is summarized among Aikido practitioners through the Zen concept of ‘beginner’s mind’. The idea being to always perceive one’s self as a student, never a master.

In How We Decide, Jonah Lehrer points out the fallacy of certainty. He argues that when someone is certain of their perspectives they block out disconfirming evidence which often leads to foolish decisions. (A look across Wall St. and the self-proclaimed Masters of the Universe seems compelling substantiation of this point.)

Instead, Lehrer recommends people seek out contrarian input so as to listen to and participate in the argument that goes on in our heads. The brain, it seems, is wired for internal conflict. This is a part of how it comes to right decisions. To short-cut this process can be counter productive. This is at odds with a culture that demands rapid decision making and headline-worthy declarative statements.

Aikido as a martial system has a finite number of named techniques and applications. These are practiced again and again in different scenarios. (i.e. the same defensive technique is applied to varying types of attacks.) Only through constant repetition can a student internalize the form so that when a sudden situation arises they can be confident that the right response will be automatic.

I often admonish students who verbally explain to me what they should do. “So I should pull the arm forward and then…”

“Don’t tell me, show me. Aikido is learned with your body. There’s nothing to say.”

You can imagine how well this goes over.

Learning Aikido takes time which frustrates many people. There is no short cut. You can’t rush it. You have to take the long road and make many mistakes. You have to be willing to look foolish in front of peers as you fall clumsily or accidentally fumble a training sword dropping it with loud clatter.

In learning Aikido you must allow for enough time to make these mistakes to re-wire the brain to allow the body to react perfectly in the spur of the moment.

This is of course no great martial arts secret. Professional athletes go through the same process. So do designers, engineers and managers. It is in short experience that we pay for in senior executives. Experience commands higher salaries because experience (in theory anyhow) allows for efficiencies in right decision making.

Think about this the next time you pay a high premium hiring a whiz kid. They may be very bright and accomplished in discreet areas of their craft, but have they had the field experience to apply that knowledge under business duress? Battle tested matters as much as book smarts and likely more because the books are being rewritten continuously.

I have mentioned before my quarrel with self-proclaimed experts in fields so new there hasn’t been the time to develop expertise (i.e. social media). I don’t argue that some better-oriented people might be able to guide lesser-oriented people in becoming familiar with these new technologies. However, to assume someone with a few years tinkering in new technologies is an expert on the impact and execution of those technologies is naive. We should all be wary of masters of any universe.

As the Zen folks say, “A (self proclaimed) master has filled their cup so full of their own knowledge there is no room to learn any more.”

Lehrer finishes his book with a quote from Colin Powell, “First tell me what you know. Then tell me what you don’t know. Only then can you tell me what you think.”

Sound advice.