Drowning in information overload

By Molly Flatt

Ever feel like this?

dltq @ Flickr

In ‘sometimes I feel like a bitch’, astute blogger and internet researcher Danah Boyd has nailed a familiar sensation:

‘I am drowning in information overload. I cannot read everything that I want to, engage in conversations with everyone I’d like to, let alone deal with high-bandwidith content like video. Over the last decade, I’ve developed a set of coping mechanisms for dealing with online conversations. Ways of keeping myself sane amidst the onslaught. The problem is that each new genre of communication and consumption brings new challenges and forces me to adjust. And just when I think that I’ve got a grip on what’s going on, the genre gains mainstream adoption and I’m forced to get all rigid on people. And I hate that.’

It’s a feeling that seems to intensify around this time of year. Like many folk, I was on holiday in August: drastically un-plugged in for 2 whole weeks. It felt strange but wonderful to be engaging in rambling, day-long conversations with people I barely knew, and I realised that, to cope with the scale of social media, I have become superfocused in my online conversation, shooting out crafted nuggets to targeted communities – a tweeted theatre recommendation to my arts crowd; a group Facebook update of that week’s plans to London mates. I miss the randomness, the luxury, the time and space of that more tangential socialising.

We can become so keen to maximise the return from our social media time, we can often forget the joy of discovery which led us to those platforms, feel ourselves going rigid like Boyd, loosing the flexibility and openness we brought to social media in the first place.

When crafting WOM campaigns, it’s essential to be focused, and relevant, and tightly strategic – but it’s also important to make space to enjoy the social landscape for a while. If you’re going to get people – people who are just as busy and glutted with conversational platforms as you are – to engage in such a crowded space around your brand, you’re going to have to remind them why they actually like to socialise and talk. Don’t make everything about aggressive action and focus. Get them in a room with some very different other people and dream up some if-onlys.

Just a thought.

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Brought into the world on Wednesday, September 16th, 2009 and filed under Uncategorized.

  • http://twitter.com/geoffbannister Geoff Bannister

    Nicely put Molly, and it struck a chord with me having been at the Oxford Social Media Convention last Friday. Full of social media enthusiasts, obviously, but interestingly, while people (including myself) were busy tweeting nuggets to the rest of the crew back at work, a fellow tweeter at the Convention posted on the Tweetdeck display for all to see, something along the lines of ‘how is it possible for someone to engage in a conversation, listen to others, give their own contribution, and tweet at the same time?’ I believe the tweeter was referring to one of the panel who was tweeting during the session.

    And I got to thinking, how long before we are standing in the foyer of such events, talking to another person, and tweeting on our iPhones what we are saying, or he/she is saying?

    It seems social media is in danger of arriving at the place that mass tourism arrived at, whereby, on reaching a far flung destination, we reach for our camera and have our photo taken in front of it, rather than savouring the moment of arrival for ourselves. Capturing becomes the experience itself, and is duly ticked off our list.

    That’s a crude comparison, I know, but I think if anything came out of the Convention last Friday, it was that ‘no matter what the technology offers, you still need to write good stuff’, to exercise discrimination in what you write/post about, and that some of that skill at least comes from hearing/meeting people in the flesh, and allowing for that randomness to which you allude in your post.

    Maybe a compulsory ‘summer holiday’ from online social networks for all?!