Phil Morle says "We need time to think"

Phil Morle has just posted about the information overload and media 2.0 scale issues I have been covering lately and he makes an excellent point:

"We are becoming good filters, but poor philosophers. We are good at information retrieval and storage and not so good at the long-thought. We need machines to become better at filtering media 2.0 - show us the important stuff, let us get into the background stuff if we have the time and let us trust that we aren't missing anything. We need time to think." [Emphasis added]

To put it another way, I wonder if we have more information... but less understanding.

Just like 24 hour news networks (who suffer from too much chatter and not enough context), we spend so much time trying to keep up with, comment about and clip/snip/remix everything we may have forgotten how to keep perspective.

Watching Robert Scoble's presentation about "Living in a Google World" it struck me that he has learned a lot about filtering information for himself. He admits he does a lot of his filtering based on how a post or headline might catch his eye, and also by a learned sense of authority about the author of a post.

It's great that people like us have time to process all this information and think deeply about information consumption and trends.

But I think most people don't have time.

Knowledge workers have traditionally had the benefit of analyst reports and high-quality premium data to give them insight into emerging trends.

Now, however, there is a need for them to join the real-time conversation and filter information for themselves. How will this affect their ability to synthesize new ideas and keep their eye on long-term opportunities?

I fear most people will end up in a reactive echo-chamber world with very little original thought because they are too busy just trying to keep up. Or maybe that's nothing new?

I'd like to think there is a better way...

Does Media 2.0 Scale? When do we reach Saturation?

I have had this question in the back of my mind for a month now.

"Does Media 2.0 Scale"

If one of the tenets of being in 'Social Media' is for everyone to be... well... social - at one point does your ability to socialize reach saturation point?

To me, Robert Scoble is the best example of this emerging problem.

It seems to me that he is the ultimate Social Media 'celebrity'. He takes his social responsibility seriously. He lists his cell phone and email address on his website and responds to most of his email. He blogs like crazy and comments on blogs that mention him. He talks on panels and joins all sorts of crazy workgroups.

And now... he is adding every single one of his followers on Twitter as a friend!

This is at once both admirable and crazy. How can he possible keep up?

Surely he has (or soon will) reach the limits of his social scale.

I'd like to ask Robert, as one of Media 2.0's leading social celebrities, to write a post about how he deals with all these people coming at him asking for attention - how does he Pay Attention to everyone.

Consider also that if Robert is the new model of celebrity - where the host of your favourite TV show needs to be accessible and social - how does this kind of activity scale to mainstream levels.

Fill us in Robert!

What does everyone else think? Perhaps this is a follow on from the 'My Media Consumption Diet' meme. How do you decide what to ignore and how do you try to scale up your social interactions. How is it possible for more visible people to do the same. How can all of this 'level up' when social becomes mainstream?

Maybe scale is not a desirable effect though? If we scale our interactions up - do we not necessarily have to scale the depth of those interactions down?