Yesterday Jim Kukral posted about how he was going to have to leave Twitter for awhile because it was becoming just too hard to keep a handle on the minute by minute flood of information that came his way. It doesn’t matter if the information that flowed like an endless stream of nattering magpies contained gems that were worthy of following up on or not. The over all effect of trying to deal with the massive amount of incoming messages meant it was inevitable that the noise would over power any of the potential that was hidden away in the stream.

This feeling isn’t just the realm of things like Twitter but also include any of the social networks that we seem to be forever joining and spending time trying to deal with the deluge of information - both valuable and pointless.

At one point we only had to deal with email spam and pointless one line messages that could have easily be said over that archaic contraption called a telephone but instead we found our time being wasted having to deal with the mundane and stupid. Then along came Instant Messaging and email was declared dead as being old school. Only email didn’t die but actually increased in usage and on top of that we had to deal with the mundane and stupid with the all new world of IM’ing.

To all this we now add things like social networking and blogs and RSS feeds with email still being the principal system of notification. So where has all this so-called new technology gotten us - nothing more than new ways to be spammed by everything from Cialis pushers to please make me your friend and advertising spam.

Even with all these so-called new ways to share information we are still left with a simple fact - it is also even more ways for our time to be wasted with having to deal with shit that sometimes outweighs the valuable information which ends up getting lost even faster in the noise of communication methods that aren’t really doing anything to make us more productive.

As a side note this was one of the reason when I wrote TwitBox for Twitter I included the option for the user to create color coded keyword tags so that if they appeared in a message you would be able to see it at a glance. It was just a simple way for the user to get some value from the useless chaff that most of the messages are for a lot of people.

I understand where Jim is coming from when he says he is leaving Twitter; even if for a short while, as I have felt the same way many times and probably would have done the same if it wasn’t for the fact that I wrote TwitBox. That said I can’t count the times where I have glanced through the posted messages and wondered just what was the point of all this mundaneness flooding the internet. Granted I have; especially recently because of some things I am working on, have found that Twitter has been useful but it required some real focusing of what you want to get from it and being able to filter out the useless bits.

The trick is being able to figure out those filters are; even if they might change day to day, and stick to them. This also applies to all the other forms of information wave riding we do whether it be our email, RSS feeds or updating your social networks even if means stepping back from it all for an hour or even a day.

After all - it will all still be there when you sign back on and chances are you haven’t really missed all that much but you may have save your sanity for a few more hours.

Listening to: Mind.in.A.box - Crossroads - Stalkers

Conversation Tags: information overload, social networks, Twitter, email