Steve Rubel on Twitter And The Limits Of Attention
Steve wonders if Twitter represents a new sort of tool that can help us with the overload of information in the world. The answer is yes.
[from Micro Persuasion: Twitter, Human Attention and Moore's Law][...]
What I believe, however, is that our attention span will hit a wall. It's why people migrate from site to site and few have staying power (Geocities, Friendster? Exactly). If Twitter continues its meteoric rise, then we may well be witnessing a changing of the guard. That doesn't mean blogging as we know it will go away. But it will surely morph in Twitter's wake if a big shift is underway.
Twitter represents -- along with other social presence technologies -- a shift to what I have been calling traffic and flow apps, and away from static URLs.
In a recent presentation at Etel, which I have retitled Overload, Shmoverload, I touched on the coming shift to flow applications, a topic I have written about a lot recently:
[from Traffic and Flow]I have been working on something (hush hush) that winds up providing similar capabilities, although not limited to a plugin for one blog technology. And more importantly, I think, it moves away from the concept of a chronology of posts, toward an acceptance of what I think is the core dual elements of future social applications: flow and traffic.
Social applications are -- at their basis -- a means for us to communicate. Not just point-to-point communication, as in email or in IM, but increasingly a more general communication from me to the network of others that believe that I matter. This is what blogging affords us, and Flickr streams, and even Twitter.
We are sending all sorts of traffic -- different sorts of messages -- flowing through the various implicit and explicit social networks that we define ourselves through, and through which we discover meaning, belonging, and insight.
This traffic flow -- made more liquid by RSS and instant messaging style real-time messaging -- is the primary dynamic that I believe we will see in all future social apps.
And as we learn to accomodate a flow style of social interaction and network-based viral information movement, our thoughts about time, attention, and connectedness will change. We will train the neurons, like jugglers do, and we will shift toward a sort of attention field rather than focusing on one thing at a time. That's how jugglers do it. We will see our consciousness change, and then our ethos.
We will find that small apps that provide us small bits of situational awareness, or fragments of social connectedness, will become more critical, and older models of interaction -- like email, forums, chat rooms -- where we have to go to them to use them, will fall away.
In a world of flow, information will find us. And we will find ourselves more connected, in a richer world, with a different form of attention.
"And as we learn to accommodate a flow style of social interaction and network-based viral information movement, our thoughts about time, attention, and connectedness will change."
If we're really high maybe. Seriously Stowe, no matter how hard geeks try, they're not going to turn people into ducks. Sure, for some of our more noted voices in the Web 2.0 movement, abject superficiality and banality is second nature. I cannot summarize what I am doing into less than 140 words. Well, how's this: "I am in the loo, I gotta pee"? Speaking of flow.
- Amanda
Posted by: Amanda Chapel | March 12, 2007 at 04:05 PM
Provocative thoughts, thank!
Posted by: Bill Olen | March 12, 2007 at 05:23 PM
I had the *best* chicken quesadilla for lunch today. twitteroutstanding!
Posted by: Thomas Hawk | March 12, 2007 at 06:33 PM
Amanda and Thomas -- I think you are mistaking the medium for the message. The impact of television is largely independent of situation comedies, and the impact of twitter will be largely independent of the apparent banality of twittering about lunch, going to the john, or being stuck at the airport.
Posted by: Stowe Boyd | March 13, 2007 at 11:56 AM