This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 2nd, 2008 at 3:47 am and is filed under Advertising Factor, Attention Factors, Business Factors, Change Factors, Choice Factors, Disruptive Factors, Education Factors, Human Factors, Individual Factors, Influence Factors, Learning Factor, Market Factors, Media Factors, Strategic Factors, Systemic Factors, Technology Factors, Time Factors, social commerce. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
04 2nd, 2008
We are all bombarded with invites, offers, news, connections and an overload of information from the web on a daily basis. The proliferation of communications that can reach us anywhere, anytime with anything and everything has and is at times overwhelming to say the least.
With so much information surrounding us and our passion for quick answers we miss the value of learning and creating relations with meaning. Those that have learned to optimize our attention already have a significant advantage over others. Our attention is really the driver to getting personal and professional leverage. The Social Web is the means which enables leverage, you can reach and give to a mass or swarm vs a few or a small gathering. Those who can accomplish the greatest leverage will be those that gain the most in The Relationship Economy. Those that adopt, or I should say, transform their thinking and trust in the essence of human relations and the value of technology will perpetuate value faster than ever before. However, we are all becoming overwhelmed with choices.
The Dynamics We are all Facing Becomes the Paradox of Choice.
In any given day our business and personal task include hundreds of technological exchanges which we use to increase our reach, gather new information, improve our learning, expand relations and try to enrich those we already have relations with, both on and off line. In the midst of all this activity we also try to insure our family’s economic future while trying to leverage the value of technology to do more with less.
The accelerating expansion of knowledge and technology simultaneously is pushing up the demand curve while pushing down the supply curve of time. When technology explodes choices become more valuable as they become more plentiful and subsequently overloading one’s ability to assimilate. The only factor which is becoming scarce is our time and attention. Since psychology has a label for everything we will label this “TADD”, Technological Attention Deficit Disorder!
Daily we are bombarded with new functions and features which are aimed at facilitating faster, more meaningful reach, proposed new efficiency and a host of other value propositions. However, for those of us involved and using all of this technology the one thing that needs to happen, and will, is integrative technological breakthroughs that enable us to better manage our time through one interface by segment of use. Once this happens then we will see the creation of a new economy that enables individuals to better balance their time and use it wisely for whatever personal and professional aim. Until then a few are bearing the burden that comes with learning new technology but once lifted the old burden will become the value we can pass on to the masses so collectively we can gain more time to create more value.
But where should we spend our time and energy? It’s obvious nearly everyone desires to have choices in life. And when we don’t get to make the choice in an area we may consider as important in our lives – we often resist because we enjoy our freedom and don’t like being forced to do anything. But what almost no one realizes is that there’s a very real limit to the number of choices we can enjoy. And when you cross that line, choice goes from good to bad awfully fast.
Just because some choice is good, doesn’t mean that even more choices is better. The first effect of too many choices tends to be paralysis. We have too many options to choose from so we can’t choose at all. I see this all the time in Internet marketing and with small business owners.
There are so many different ways to leverage social computing and so many opinions on the right way to do it. What ends up happening is we go out looking for the “right” way to do things often finding ourselves going down a rabbit trail of confusion which naturally leads to inaction. And experts tell us they see this all the time – the more choices we have the greater our belief that there is a perfect solution or perfect place for us somewhere buried deep within the choices.
What follows is predictable… the stronger our belief that there is a perfect solution out there (whatever perfect means) the more we end up searching for that perfect solution– wasting more time than is really necessary or appropriate. Unfortunately it doesn’t end there. Because the more convinced we are there’s a perfect solution out there, the less likely we will be happy with our final decision since it never lives up to the false belief of the perfect solution.
If You Think More Is Better…Than You Don’t Know Yourself As Well As You Think
A consistent problem we all have is the conviction that more is always better than less. But the truth is most people don’t really know themselves that well (of course we all think we do). That’s why most people don’t know what’s good for themselves.
So we go around joining more networks, learning and using more technology with the mistaken belief that all of this activity will pay off in the end. But the truth is the polar opposite. Because as the number of networking tactics you know climbs, mastery in any of them plummets. And online this is even more costly than offline. Since the social networking space is exploding we are being swamped with invitations to join numerous networks and most of the time it is from people we’re already connected with in another network, go figure!
My daily technological interactions include dependence on: two cell phones, a blackberry, a Macintosh and a Windows based computer, a GPS navigation system with XM Satellite integrated into my automobiles interface, numerous online tools including technocrati, stumbleupon, Google Reader, Web mail, Word Press, Yahoo Forums, Linkedin, Facebook and a host of other social computing sites, Feedblitz, Wikipedia, Wikispace, Mashable, Twitter, Plaxo, MyBlogLog, Blog Carnival, Numerous Widgets, Digital Cable TV, Skype and numerous other technology things, Whew, I am technologically overload and it is stealing my time!
Excuse me for a few moments, I just got invited to seven more networks, I have over 100 invitations waiting to connect with people throughout numerous communities, I have three chats going on Skype at the same time and several friends are asking me to post in their new community, and someone just invited me to try out a new organization technology promising to save me time….back to my interruptions and subsequent choices. Oh yeah, my wife just bought a new car and wants me to help her figure out how to sync her cell phone with the audio system in the car. I think I have TADD!
The Relationship Economy should make our choices simpler and give us our time back.
Can You Relate? What say you?
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April 2nd, 2008 at 6:52 am
Jay,
Your post showing up on my Facebook page only adds to this barrage of digital noise. For a scholar, your grammar and spelling are horrendous. You should know better. I could not get past your second paragraph because I was too busy shaking my head at how you spelled “versus”, and your misused comma in the fourth sentence of the second paragraph.
April 2nd, 2008 at 7:35 am
Don’t mind a good conversation and its the results that count in my book.
If the previous negative commenter would look up and read a biography of Hemingway he was a terrible speller and grammar does not have to follow rules. Get creative.
Hey Jay you just keep on writing and let the ones who have nothing to contribute to the conversation other than projecting their failure and anger et al just turn into a puff of ashes.
Kindest,
Michael Pokocky
bonus+ Someone come in right after me and show your support please. Jay is working his ass off to bring relevant content to help you. Who gives a _ _ _ _!!!! about spelling and et al. Like I said its the results that count. And I know for a fact there are some really big names out their watching what is being said here and that in my books is success for this blog. Thank you very much.
April 2nd, 2008 at 7:43 am
Michael:
Thank you for the kind words. I often wonder why people leave a comment with the name annoyed? OK, so I make spelling and grammar mistakes, so what. I never claimed to be a professional writer who publishes in Business Week or Forbes and Oh by the way, no one pays me to write
April 2nd, 2008 at 7:44 am
Gee – I think that is one of the endearing things about Jay’s writing. It is content, presentation, and pow that keeps your attention. Alllll the ltle erors jst r brain tzeres.
He is smart like a whip – is he playing with the analytical part of your mind trying to shake it up? Methinks so.
April 2nd, 2008 at 12:49 pm
Jay,
Your post showing up on my Facebook page is an indication that we are friends. If for some reason I got annoyed with your slice of the digital noise, I would de-friend you and then send a private email to you . . . not an anonymous, spineless, comment on your blog that accused you of being a scholar . . . puh-lease!
April 3rd, 2008 at 5:44 am
Jay, love the spelling errors and misdpalced comma’s and whateever. It is the massage that counts. And just for the record, I think it’s rather Jazzy, some of the monumental notes in jazz were created when the player actually hit the wrong note, it creates tension and makes you wanna hear a solution, which always comes in the same improvisation.
In addition to that, I am so dislictic myself that I would not recognise a speling error even with a red underlining lol.
In the end your message is more important and we all appreciate that.
If we were in here for the grammar and spelling instead of the conversation and message, annoyed would be right. Personal projections however contribute hardly to a better understanding of the issues involved here.
So Jay , keep up the god (haha) work, and I don’t mind a typo here and there, I have a rep myself when it comes to that.
Love, John
April 3rd, 2008 at 5:54 am
John, Thanks much and LOL
The negative comment has motivated me to assess how humans are rated, historically and now in the social sphere’s. My research has quickly revealed some interesting insights on how the histroy of “rating or ranking people” has produced both negative and positive results but it is a well established mindset and system that at times seems to be an automatic metal and behavioral process embedded in all of us.
Stay tuned for “How Do You Rate”, I think it is going to be interesting and provocative pending I don’t make any grammar or spelling errors
April 3rd, 2008 at 11:20 pm
Hi Jay I look forward to that and it’s interactions like these that make me happy to be back on the block after a social networking sabbatical.
John
April 9th, 2008 at 7:56 am
Just when I was thinking how clever your Facebook post linking to your blog was, I find this. I really like your pictures and graphics. As for your misspellings and punctuation, I never really noticed because I looked at the content. I still think your blog and Internet methods clever, and I am a former college instructor with a degree in English.
Where did you get you blogging T shirt?
Joy~
Jeanette