The second challenge is distraction.
Distraction is so common in our online experience that we have come to expect it. And worse – we often accept it.
But it doesn’t have to be. There is an increasing understanding of how our digital lives are affecting our attention, and what we can do about it. See Linda Ray on Attentional Intelligence.
As described by noted author and speaker Linda Stone “attention is the most powerful tool of the human spirit.” See The Attention Project.
By publishing many unrelated posts one after another, social networks create conditions called “rapid toggling” and “context switching”. This means that users have difficulty consuming social media and live in a state of “continuous partial attention.” We all do it.
The problem is that sustaining partial attention is driven by fear not opportunity. We are afraid of “missing out”. Id.
The net result is that we personally lose productivity.
To sustain attention, we have to create context from the information contained in all of our networks. And we have to design our information consumption patterns so that information is related.
That is what personalized social media management is all about.
Illustrations of Rapid Toggling and Context Shifting
Your social network feeds may look much like mine. My Twitter feed is a sea of unrelated content. In this page the content spans topics: football, brides (a business interest), finance, and men’s fashion. How can a person possibly toggle between and consider each one?
My Facebook feed isn’t much better. On the page to the right from my Facebook feed of November 14th: There are 100 posts. Twenty five percent (25 %) are sponsored posts of publishers, or advertisers. Seventy five percent (75%) are friends posts – not chronological – the order is determined by a Facebook algorithm. Virtually one hundred percent (100%) of my adjacent posts have a different context.
