Some of the regular visitors to this blog may have noticed that I have posted progressively less over the last 6 months. Recently my posting has almost come to a standstill. There’s a lot behind this, which I’ve been trying to make sense of.
In short, it comes down to a sense of frustration I’m having with the amount of information I seem to have to deal with before anything actually gets done. As an example, besides spam, I get around 80 emails a day, all of which seem to require an urgent response. This is not good for someone who spends most of his time out the office working with groups. It basically means that most of my time in the office is split between dealing with email, and reading news so I can stay in touch with industry trends and innovations. This leaves very little time to spend working with my colleagues (at Huddlemind, Creative Commons and Muti) on important stuff like strategy. All this information feels like it’s paralysing me!
In fact, this sense has sat with me for a while, and it’s the primary reason why I’ve been so drawn to the study and practice of “Attention Economics”.
So, regarding my blog…
Someone Has Already Said It
Perhaps the main reason I haven’t been posting is because, quite honestly, everything I can think of saying has already been said by someone else online. And its not often that I have felt I could say it better.
For those who are interested in what I recommend reading, or what I find interesting, I would like to introduce you to my Diigo links which you can see in the sidebar on the right. There are some superb finds there, and they’re all sorted by topic/tag.
I feel so full up with other people’s information that there’s barely enough space for me to form my own insights and share them.
Experiences vs Information
Maya Angelou once said: “People will forget what you tell them, but will never forget how you make them feel”.
For people, like me, who believe that our Attention is increasingly scarce and valuable today, there is a cost attached to each new piece of information that we consume. Information consumes Attention. Despite my knowledge and understanding of “Attention Economics”, I’ve been spendthrift with my own Attention. Now I have a bit of a deficit to deal with – each waking moment is currently spent processing the information I’ve amassed, at the expense of the experiences and interactions I could be having.
Information, by the way, is inherent in everything. It’s just that we have come to prioritize encoded information – in the form of writing, sounds, and video – over real-world, information – in the form of experiences.
Reading and Writing
When I first started blogging, I enjoyed the sense of personal discovery through public disclosure. However, at some point the blogging became more about building an audience than about sharing ideas.
I can say the same about live chat, email, and meetings. My initial experience of these filled me with delight in the process of sharing ideas. They all now seem more like an obligation than a priviledge.
So in my attempt to reclaim my own sense of daily delight in my work and online pursuits, I am cutting down on all these attention traps, drastically. In their place, I hope to clear some space to experience and to reflect more, and to allow my own insights to emerge.
As my esteemed friend, Joe Botha, has said: “The true breakfast of champions is a low information diet”.
Hi Dave,
I both agree & disagree with your stance.
I agree because:
- I’m slowly getting to the point where I need to stay behind the PC all day, just to get through my social network posts, blogs, statuses, updates, etc, etc.
- I figure that if I can get my friends & clients to follow one (or all) of my ’streams’ (eg. FriendFeed), then they’d ‘get’ my side of the conversation (just like I could follow your Diigo links)
- Every time I read a book that I love, I think to myself, “That’s the book I wanted to write!”. And I end up recommending the book instead of writing another one. Ultimately, I end up ‘copying’ someone else’s ideas instead of innovating my own.
But here’s the problem:
I follow your blog Dave, because I want to find out who you are, what you’re up to, what YOUR opinion is on what you’ve found.
Because anyone can now start a stream, I now need to make a choice why I need to follow YOURS. You Dave, are fighting for my attention, and right now you’ve got it because you expressed an idea. It so happens that I have something to say about it. But until now, during your silence, I have no need to write a comment here.
I’m less likely to write a comment on your ‘tagged’ stories – unless you make a comment on the particular story. That also depends if I’m subscribed to that service – Digg, delicious, Facebook, Friendfeed, twitter- HOW MANY DO I NEED TO SUBSCRIBE TO so that I can hear what Dave Duarte has to say?
Isn’t this all supposed to be about having a dialogue with more people – more people who can leverage your idea of the world?
Of course, this question is only PART rhetorical. You now have an opportunity to engage me in this dialogue, on a platform that allows us to share a point of view to the world. Interestingly, you’re more likely to reply through this medium, than if I had written an email to you about this … what does that tell us?
So, in the interest of coming up with solutions, here are some options for you:
- Publish to your blog in a different medium. Tell us a thought in your car, upload as mp3?
- Tell me where we can engage ‘in real life’ more regularly, but make this engagement available to more people online so that they can take part too.
- Hire someone to write down your thoughts to blog.
- Hire a virtual secretary to handle all ‘non-essential’ work processes (like answering emails).
But there is something ironic about this whole matter:
With Rafiq away (#getwellrafiq) & you slowing down with your online engagement, is this an early indicator of things to come?
Are the South Africans who preach about having an active online presence slowly having to withdraw after ‘over-committing’ themselves?
(Yet here I am on a Sunday, a family day, reading & replying to your blog when I should be offline.)
Marcel, thank you so much for this well thought out and insightful comment.
I’m not saying that I’m going to stop blogging at all. In fact I’m hoping to blog more. But what I am going to do is start using this more as a place for my own thinking and reflection, rather than simply a space to repurpose other people’s ideas (as many business bloggers do).
I want to get in touch with the more personal nature of blogging. And leave the news to the journalists. It’s exhausting trying to keep on top of everything!
Ah … in other words you’re ready to niche your blog?
I’m beginning to sense a ‘fork’ of blogging in the future – for me, but possibly others too – and there seems to be certain path emerging:
1. The standard blog: the newsletter, the book, the diary. The area we write to share our own thoughts. (’Broadcasting’)
1.b. Microblogging/twitter/status updates/asides : like above, but limited to smaller chunks
2. The lifestream : everything we find that we want to share with people that would provide value of some sort. This is stuff that you’d like to share on your blog, because it can double as your central repository for your shared items (which inspired the ’simplelife’ & ‘complexlife’ wordpress plugins) (’Channeling’)
3. The networking media: where you collect the fans & subscribers so that they can find some way of keeping in touch & subscribing to Dave’s News Station: driving them to either #1 or #2 above. (’Advertising’)
(Interestingly, you can combine #1 & #2 in various ways e.g. Friendfeed or Profilactic or the ‘onsite’ repository. But there doesn’t seem to be one unifying method to do #3 – find everyone over different networks… )
>I want to get in touch with the more personal nature of blogging.
>And leave the news to the journalists.
>It’s exhausting trying to keep on top of everything!
YOU are the journalist, I read your news BECAUSE it’s personal. It’s news to me.
I think the reason we read *any* news is because it’s personal … hold that thought. Years ago when we read/shared the news, it was because it directly affect our own lives in a personal way. Now I can read/watch/discuss news from the other side of the world that does NOT directly affect me – making it less ‘news’ & making it more ‘trivia’ (although it’s sold as ‘news’).
Inevitably, all ‘news’ is ‘trivia’ to someone else (many people will trash my 2c opinion here) … but I think that because you & I are now more open our filter for ‘news’ that *may or may not* affect us, we create these ‘relationships’ with more & more people. So we need to sit & read every bit of information to find out what is *really* this-directly-affects-my-life news.
Because I’m now opening up my filters to more & more relationships, I’m getting more & more trivia … closing these filters are virtually impossible – have you ever sat down & considered deleting all those Facebook ‘friends’ & Twitter ‘follows’ that provide zero value? Don’t you feel guilty because you might disturb the ‘relationship’?
Dave, we’re entering the dawn of a new social dynamic that comes with this ‘new media’ thing: what does it mean to be ‘friends’? Do you write your blog to attract these ‘friends’? Or do you attract more ‘friends’ by writing about your perspective?
The answer is … I have no idea. I haven’t blogged long enough yet.
(Aside: And how does email fit into all of this?)
Marcel, once again, you’re spot on. I blog because it tends to attract the kind of people who are interested in the same stuff I am. I don’t think that makes me a journalist though. And many professional journalists would heartily agree!
Email fits into this because it’s also a way to build and develop relationships digitally. Problem comes when you have too many relationships in the air – a person can only handle a certain amount.
At a certain level social media and email are superbly useful and beneficial to real-world interactions and experiences. However, at least for me, I’ve exceeded that level (considering that the nature of my work keeps me out of the office most of the time).
This article struck a chord: http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200807/google
This is a bit of a cyncial response – I have often thought that there should be a seth godin / gapingvoid / techcrunch API. Everyone is writing the same stuff and hollowing the the soul from the inside to where its getting high on it’s own supply.
Anyways, this API would be an web service that would randomly re-arrange the ideas of Seth, Hugh, and Arrington (and a growing list of other features) with a few of your own new words and voila – repurposed content that sounds different thats the same as the next…*yawn*
I heard a wonderful term for this – intellectual porn – you just cant get enough of something that feels that good, but somehow it’s not the real thing – I like blogs and all things web2.0 but the whole thing has become a cerebral and intellectual wank of the writer getting a headrush and intellectual climax of being able to convey an idea, but in the great words of Og Mandino – “This too shall pass”
I have been having this yuck image from terminator / matrix where everyone is connecting to the machine, and by choice choosing to plug-in, tune-out and over-value pokes, super-pokes and all that other living-other-peoples-lives-through-facebook crap that passes for the real thing.
But then again, William Blake said – “The road to wisdom is through excess” maybe after all this digital, soc-net excess we can appreciate real-life and not second-life.
I Love the idea of the Arrington/Godin/MacLoed Api. Lol!
So, I agree heartily with what you write here. Thing is, this digital life can enhance my real world experience too.
Thank you for this superb comment, Digital Cynic 2.0 (where can I find your blog??)
Just turn it off.
Someone has tricked us into thinking all this information is important
Dave,
Right now I would like to remain a Dark Knight and preserve some Identity2.0 anonymity.
The Buddha talks about The Middle Way which I believe is the way through here.
Hi Dave,
I sense that this move is correct for you. A person as active as yourself in terms of this space does really need to watch out for information overload. I think that though that as an exponent of this space very often people hunt you out for some sort of endorsement or comment. This is more than likely going to remain a by product of your work.
I need to add that since Nomadic Marketing I have started my own blog, (quick punt!!) courtesy of Adii. I find that this some days really does consume me and am needing to ensure that I do not get caught up. Enough said, I wish you well on your program and trust that your diet will make you even stronger and wiser!
Thanks so much for the supportive comment Mike. Your blog is looking awesome!!
BTW: Since this blog post, I’ve got an email assistant. Let’s see how that goes!