(Photo taken from the NY Times)

This concept isn’t a new one to me but a valuation of Twitter at at least 4 billion dollars on behalf of Google really made me wonder… At what point will we have exhausted our ability to take in all this content stimulus before us. At 4 billion big ones, obviously Twitter is worth that much to some one. I don’t doubt it by any stretch. But, I only have two eyes and 24 hours in a day. Taking the time, scrolling through Twitter is really just a drop in the bucket of how I would want to allocate my time in a day. To be frank, I have no idea where I stand in regards to Twitter people I follow at ~230 people… but it’s exhausting to keep up. Maybe I should cut some off the list, that’s another potential option.

But as I see it, Twitter, Facebook, mobile gaming, these are all competing for our attention span. None really seem to have any sort of holding power to me, maybe for the better. The last thing I want to do is waste away my precious time doing an activity that I get virtually no benefit from. But in retrospect, how do other people control their online habits (some obviously don’t)? Do they succumb to overbearing aspect of information overload… or do they continue on living their lives oblivious to the fact the very “ding” of a new message is controlling their lives? Personally, if somebody else is dictating my flow, I am not in control and that’s a problem to me.

I’ve stressed this before, with the aforementioned communication platforms plus the web itself, how one filters their content seems highly overlooked. Right now everybody says “too much information”, but this statement needs a further development to it. How will we cope and deal, and find out that the time spent on these social platforms is giving us diminishing returns? I’m not saying let’s cut out Twitter and Facebook… but imagine how much more progressive of a society we would be if Content Filtration 101 was a necessary and beneficial class in the academic agenda?

When I refer to “content filtration”, it’s the ability to distinguish what is necessary and useful and what is simply not worth our time. It’s as simple as that.

I wish I could have posted this BEFORE this NY Times article about how kids are seeing their already minute attention spans diminish, so I can’t claim clairvoyance. But even this, yes we are highlighting a problem but there still isn’t a solution. We can’t sever our ties with technology, we have simply adapt and become smarter at its use, but I don’t see anybody doing that as of right now on an institutional level.

-Eugene