[T]he more urgently technology incentivizes us to respond to a proposition, the more we rely on our own heuristics. Less time does not promote deeper thought.Today, when you are compelled to comment right away, ask yourself, “How would I respond to this differently if I had to invest the time and effort to get an envelope and a stamp?”
via James Shelley – photo credit: Daria Nepriakhina
Twitter will suggest that you listen to people who listen to each other. Amazon will suggest that you read something very much like what you just read. Even your search engine will try to make sure that you get results that are similar to the ones you clicked on last time. If you go with the flow, you’ll end up hearing the same narrow view recycled repeatedly – yet you’ll think you did your due diligence.
Don’t fool yourself.
Gather information from those who do not communicate with one another. In fact, you want to gather information from entire networks that do not communicate with one another. Truly rich and diverse information comes only when you hear, separately and independently, from “worlds” that do not overlap: from different parts of the earth, different economic sectors, different social demographics, different religions, languages, ideologies and cultures.
Most people struggle to kill their accounts permanently. Like a bad high school romance, we break up with Facebook, only to flirt and make up, and then break up again.
This begins to make sense when we realize that Facebook has become a prosthetic of our memory.
But not just a prosthetic of memory in general, a simple list on a scrap of paper is that much; it is a prosthetic of our autobiographical memory. It’s a part of our identity, and it is very difficult to kill off a part of one’s self.
We live in a technological universe in which we are always communicating. And yet we have sacrificed conversation for mere connection.
300+ comments on this NYTimes.com opinion by Sherry Turkle, MIT professor and author of Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Each Other.
It is not unlike a press release that your corporate self announces to your target market.
via James Shelley.
I’m beginning to wonder about how big of a community can be meaningfully maintained online and how this affects news organizations. For example, many early Twitter adopters such as myself report that their rate of responses, retweets and click-thrus have declined over time.
I suspect this may have less to do with any change in behavior on our parts or that of our followers and more to do with the fact that the Twitter universe is now so large. Already overflowing streams are flooding. The likelihood that even your most interested followers will even see a tweet is ever lower.
In order to develop engaged and loyal communities on social media, news organizations are going to have to work harder and smarter and try to find solutions to Shirky’s “filter failure” problem.
¿A cuánta gente estamos dejando de conocer ahora que tenemos a todo el mundo al alcance de un clic? Nunca hemos estado más conectados, y desconectados. Nunca hemos tenido más amigos, y menos. Nunca hemos sabido de tantas personas, tan poco.
En el mundo virtual que he creado soy simpático, me lo paso en grande, viajo a lugares fascinantes y tengo cientos de amigos a quienes al parecer gusta lo que hago, quizá porque ya no tienen que hacer el esfuerzo de decírmelo. Basta con un clic.
Internet nos permite presentar una versión mejorada de nosotros mismos. La cuidamos cada día, la exponemos en el escaparate virtual y esperamos que se paren a admirarla. ¿Por qué arriesgarse a ponerla bajo la prueba del contacto directo y real?
Nunca estuvimos más acompañados. Ni más solos.
via davidjimenezblog.
