The Modern Journalist

The Firehose Ate Me. How Social Media Ruins Our Lives.

Last week was the most self-reflective I’ve seen the Web in some time. Apparently, the Web 2.0/social media phenomenon started to get to people.

The growth of mobile messaging groups, lifestreaming applications, Air desktop applications, audio and video services, aggregators, readers — you get the idea — has started to overwhelm the digerati. There’s just too much. Now, they are starting to examine what it means to rationally exist in the Social Media, Read/Write world while still maintaining sanity.

My friend Cynthia puts it best: you dip in when you can, catch up and get back to real life.

That’s what social media is ultimately best for. You have these software agents collecting all of this great information, and when you have the chance, you dip in to find out what is most interesting to you and then get back to it.

The folks at ReadWriteWeb have a post — Real People Don’t Have Time for Social Media — that breaks down the time it takes for various Web 2.0 activities. It’s a bit tongue-in-cheek, but only a bit. It’s also the best argument for The Modern Journalist, which is that nobody other than the truly dedicated digerati have time to dive into this pool and develop an understanding of its use and power. Until Real People get that, they are destined to either fall behind or struggle through the release of far too many innovations.

This led to a piece on Mashable about the value of Twitter, the mobile texting network that continues to have many digerati fans despite the current discussion about its overall value to the world. Personally, I think the digerati have this one wrong: Twitter as a platform has the opportunity to become transforming in terms of real-time communication. Unlike Robert Scobole, though, who said he believes you should follow everyone who follows you because it makes you smarter, I think you need to be selective in who you follow so you can truly interact with the people.

Interaction is the key for all of this. If we try to exist only by watching the streams fly by, we are back to a one-to-many world.

All of which has TechCrunch convinced that reducing the noise is what Web 3.0 is about. I can’t entirely disagree with that, but I can disagree a little. Web 2.0 or social media has already done that, just as Cynthia said — and just as JCR Licklider wrote about so many years ago. It’s not that Web 2.0 has created noise. It’s that people believe they must interact with everything JUST AS IT HAPPENS. NOW!

That’s not the case. We dip in and and out. We add photos when we want. We blog when we can. We podcast at will. We aren’t slaves to the mediums and media, we are the ones who control it. We are just now learning how to do that.