8. “I would expect that next year, people will
share twice as much information as they
share this year, and next year, they will be
sharing twice as much as they did the year
before”
--Mark Zuckerberg
And there’s more coming
37. Must...
stop...
How do we break
the addiction?
38. 12 step program Why not?
1. We admitted we were powerless over alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable.
2. Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.
4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
5. Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.
6. Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.
7. Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.
8. Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.
9. Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.
10. Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.
11. Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him,
praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.
12. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics,
and to practice these principles in all our affairs.
repeat about a 100 times, and day’s pretty much over so I head home.\n
And I think this only going to get worse. Every day there’s so much more stuff to consume and to read and to follow, it’s getting kind of crazy\n
Mr. zuckerberg tells us we’ll be sharing twice as much information this year as we did last year, and twice as much next year as this year\n
This is acually now called Zuckerberk’s law of social sharing\n\n(Where X is time, Y is what you will be sharing, and C is a constant.)\n
I don’t think anyone would argue that we’re getting addicted to this stuff. Every time we get a new piece of news or an email or a tweet or a like, we get a little dopamine hit that makes us feel good, and so we get addicted and we want more.\n
There’s even research that shows that there’s an erotic power in having information and being able to share it with someone. Basically gossiping is an aphrodisiac. \n
We also have this strong fear of missing out, FOMO, the feeling that we won’t know everything that we should know, which keeps us constantly checking in and connected. We fear missing out on news, or something more interesting than what we’re doing right now.\n
And so with all of this information, let me ask, when do you guys think we reach the point of “information overload”? a couple of years ago? 10 years ago? 20?\n
We also have this strong fear of missing out, FOMO, the feeling that we won’t know everything that we should know, which keeps us constantly checking in and connected. We fear missing out on news, or something more interesting than what we’re doing right now.\n
We also have this strong fear of missing out, FOMO, the feeling that we won’t know everything that we should know, which keeps us constantly checking in and connected. We fear missing out on news, or something more interesting than what we’re doing right now.\n
We also have this strong fear of missing out, FOMO, the feeling that we won’t know everything that we should know, which keeps us constantly checking in and connected. We fear missing out on news, or something more interesting than what we’re doing right now.\n
What allowed us up now to deal with all of this information are filters that controlled the rate at which we were exposed to new content.\n- publishers who were forced to limit the books they published, since they couldn’t publish every random book and expect to make money, so we only had a limited set of books to choose from\n- TV executives who had only limited timeslots during the day to fill on a limited number of channels\n- Radio stations had limited limited frequencies so they had to choose the music they played\n...so the content was filtered for us. this wasn’t a perfect solution, but it did control the rate at information was exposed to us, and made our lives easier\n
What allowed us up now to deal with all of this information are filters that controlled the rate at which we were exposed to new content.\n- publishers who were forced to limit the books they published, since they couldn’t publish every random book and expect to make money, so we only had a limited set of books to choose from\n- TV executives who had only limited timeslots during the day to fill on a limited number of channels\n- Radio stations had limited limited frequencies so they had to choose the music they played\n...so the content was filtered for us. this wasn’t a perfect solution, but it did control the rate at information was exposed to us, and made our lives easier\n
What allowed us up now to deal with all of this information are filters that controlled the rate at which we were exposed to new content.\n- publishers who were forced to limit the books they published, since they couldn’t publish every random book and expect to make money, so we only had a limited set of books to choose from\n- TV executives who had only limited timeslots during the day to fill on a limited number of channels\n- Radio stations had limited limited frequencies so they had to choose the music they played\n...so the content was filtered for us. this wasn’t a perfect solution, but it did control the rate at information was exposed to us, and made our lives easier\n
What allowed us up now to deal with all of this information are filters that controlled the rate at which we were exposed to new content.\n- publishers who were forced to limit the books they published, since they couldn’t publish every random book and expect to make money, so we only had a limited set of books to choose from\n- TV executives who had only limited timeslots during the day to fill on a limited number of channels\n- Radio stations had limited limited frequencies so they had to choose the music they played\n...so the content was filtered for us. this wasn’t a perfect solution, but it did control the rate at information was exposed to us, and made our lives easier\n
What allowed us up now to deal with all of this information are filters that controlled the rate at which we were exposed to new content.\n- publishers who were forced to limit the books they published, since they couldn’t publish every random book and expect to make money, so we only had a limited set of books to choose from\n- TV executives who had only limited timeslots during the day to fill on a limited number of channels\n- Radio stations had limited limited frequencies so they had to choose the music they played\n...so the content was filtered for us. this wasn’t a perfect solution, but it did control the rate at information was exposed to us, and made our lives easier\n
We also have this strong fear of missing out, FOMO, the feeling that we won’t know everything that we should know, which keeps us constantly checking in and connected. We fear missing out on news, or something more interesting than what we’re doing right now.\n
But now that the cost to publishing content has so famously collapsed, these filters are gone. The filters we’ve relied on to protect us from information overload are totally broken, and we didn’t evolve or really have a chance to learn how to live in this kind of world.\n
But now that the cost to publishing content has so famously collapsed, these filters are gone. The filters we’ve relied on to protect us from information overload are totally broken, and we didn’t evolve or really have a chance to learn how to live in this kind of world.\n
We also have this strong fear of missing out, FOMO, the feeling that we won’t know everything that we should know, which keeps us constantly checking in and connected. We fear missing out on news, or something more interesting than what we’re doing right now.\n
and so we’re completely overwhelmed with stuff to consume. This is what Clay Shirky calls “filter failure”. It's not that there is too much information in the world, it's that the filters we've been relying on are broken. This leads to all kinds of bad things.\n\n
With too much content to choose from, we succumb to the “paradox of choice” problem, where we have soooo much choice, which should be a good thing, but it turns out we end up being worse of. We stress out about what to do, what to pay attention to, we fear missing out, and we end up regretting our decisions a lot more.\n\n
It also turns out that we’re really bad with abundance, like an abundance of information. We’re really good at dealing with scarcity (we ration, we reduce our means, we adjust), but we’re really bad at abundance. With too much food we get fat, with too much freedom we get in trouble, with too many options we get stressed, with too much money we end up wasting it. Same thing with too much information. We don’t know how to deal with it effectively, and so we get overwhelmed.\n
So how do we avoid death by filter failure, and having to drink from the firehose of information overload? I think the solution has two parts.\n
Better filters\n
\n
Some examples of better filters are tools like Summify, that aggregate the news you friends found interesting on twitter and facebook, and send you a set of 5 stories that almost always turn out to be extremely interesting. It actually works really well, and theoretically I can completely ignore Twitter now.\n
LinkedIn is emailing me the most popular stories shared across my LinkedIn network now\n
Facebook is already doing filtering our lives, only showing us things that they think we’d find interesting, versus everything that any of our friends post\n
Gmail recently introduced priority inbox filter, where they try to figure out what you should pay attention to in your inbox\n
there’s a crapload of startups tackling this problem, each creating better filters for us. What’s cool is that it’s using our social graph and our likes and preferences to figure this out, which has only been possible as of recently. So it’s only a matter of time before filters gets better. But that’s not the whole answer.\n
Filters are only going to get us so far, especially because you can often get around the filters. The second part of the solution is basically breaking our addiction.\n
I don’t think it’s unreasonable to think that a 12 step program is part of the answer. Admitting that we have a problem, doing an inventory of our priorities, breaking the habit, etc.\nThere are also a few less drastic approaches to breaking our bad habits.\n
There’s something called the Pomodoro technique, which is a strategy of starting a timer, working completely focused for 20 or 30 minutes, and then taking a break where you can do anything you want. Doing that over and over, reducing your context switching and keeping you focused.\n
Lion has a full-screen mode that removes distractions so that you can be fully immersed in your application, and it works incredibly well.\n
There’s an app called Concentrate that’s lets you set up your computer so that you can’t start twitter, or visit facebook or whatever else that sucks up your time. If you try to start Twitter, it plays a mean sound and you get back to work.\n
Here’s a “how to focus” mindmap, not for the feint of heart\n
In the end it’s all about our own individual willpower. Training yourself to not react to notifications and updates and to be a-OK with FOMO - missing out..\n
In the end it’s all about our own individual willpower. Training yourself to not react to notifications and updates and to be a-OK with FOMO - missing out..\n
The final point I want to leave you with...there’s a chance it may be too late for all of us, that we’ve become addicts and can’t just go clean. But there’s still hope for our kids. Let’s not screw it up!\n
