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» Social Media and Self Importance: Are You Signal or Noise?

Submitted by Amitai Givertz

Jul 29, 2008

Summary

Social Media is everywhere these days. In the past 6 months, I must have signed up to dozens of social media sites, used them once or twice and then abondoned then to the box of neglected toys. The onslaught started slowly. We made friendster/MySpace/Facebook profiles, some of us started personal blogs, we got digg, del.icio.us, flickr accounts, we have dozens of blogs in our RSS readers, we all signed up for linkedin to cover the professional side, we gave twitter (and a dozen or so twitter clones) a go - we’ve hit a tipping point, we are nearing Social Media overload.

With all of these social media sites that we belong to and follow through out the day, the issue of signal to noise ratio has really reached a head. We can only take in so much information and we have far surpassed that information threshold - our brain bandwidth has hit the breaking point! Read the full article

Comments (10)

Thomaspower,

Jul 29, 2008

Interesting.

Cindy,

Jul 30, 2008

I thought you'd paraphrase JFK: "Ask not what the community can do for you but what you can do for the community." Good luck with your effort to get people to play nice. From my experience, the self-important people consider such messages to be noise. They filter them out, leaving you to preach to the choir.

Nigelwalsh,

Jul 30, 2008

interesting, surely the sites that really work and add value to the individual and community will prevail - sites like Ecademy, LinkedIN, Facebook etc. Do you keep your business and personal networks apart - why not merge Facebook and LinkedIN - LinkFace, LinkBook or would this be too much INyourFace.. the boundaries are narrowing...

Jennmae,

Jul 30, 2008

Some of my experiences on twitter inspired me to write this post. It wasn't necessarily people who signed up and just plain spammed that got me to write it, rather it was the people who just continually ask the community for things - diggs, sphins, etc - whilst minimally contributing thoughtful discussion to the group.

Antoine Bertier,

Jul 31, 2008

Interesting and important questions. I'm new in all this, but from a new user point of view, Twitter seems to invite more asking things and not really caring about the replies, while FriendFeed for instance seems to invite more do actual discussion (thoughtful or not)...

Richardk138,

Jul 31, 2008

No one likes a one sided relationship. We all have met that person that always wants something, but when you need something they are too busy or can't help for some reason, there is a lot of etiquette to be learned here.

Mani Karthik,

Jul 31, 2008

Good story. I'd not judge myself anyway.

Mcwflint,

Jul 31, 2008

Does it have to be a specific request? Or are we noise just by posting? And does that depend on the relationship we have with the person?

Isthisstupid,

Aug 02, 2008

I would venture to say that what is noise to one may in fact be signal to another: personally, I get tired of slogging through all the tech feeds to find the 5% that are useful for work and perhaps 5% that interest me personally. But then again, that's what I've got Yahoo pipes for: to help me filter the noise before it ever gets to me. Don't see why one couldn't go the same route to filter, say, an unwanted Twitter follower.

Tweric,

May 14, 2009

@nigelwalsh @isthisstupid Merge them and filter them when you do! I like the notion of a signal to noise ratio, and I also remember not to pigeon hole. Some fool might be mostly noisy (mostly cloudy?), but as the good Bard has helped us to know: often the fool says the most profound thing.

It's possible that the one signal from a noisy "friend" might surpass the many signals from a guru.

Keep having fun!