I think Scoble has hit a little jackpot in Overload of Social Media.
At LIFT we talked about Internet addiction, that turned into an article on the BBC. I spoke up and said that my addiction got me lots of benefits. More friends. Invites overseas. And lots of interesting experiences including dinner with Douglas Engelbart (still one of the highlights of my tech tour).
My experience as well, although maybe at a slightly less exalted level of dinner companion.
Well, I’m not overloaded enough, so today I’m adding all 719 of my Twitter followers as friends which means my home page is fast and furious. Why do that? So I can listen in on 719 of the world’s early adopters. That might be interesting. I might learn something. Or, I might just get overloaded. We’ll see.
[...] That leads Chris Saad to ask when we’re going to get overloaded? Oh, Chris, we’re well past that point.
He's right, we're past it. Can we just stop talking about information overload? We've been told about every 12 months for the last decade that we are "suffering" from information overload and the net result has been that every following 12 months we have found ways to multiply the amount of information that comes pouring through our connections.
I have a theory; the 'real world" creates and dumps on us levels of information via multiple senses that is many, many orders of magnitude deeper in bandwidth than anything that we can even conceive of coming across the net. Our ability to contact, filter, manage, organise and act on that information is already honed to a very high degree.
Even increasing device-based information tenfold represents a trivial increase in that information load and we actually have no problem dealing with it.
To invert Parkinson's Law, our ability to handle information expands in direct proportion to is availability.
Earl's corollary; once we realise that there are deeper wells of information to be drawn on, we dive in.
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