It’s odd that,
in an era when we are more time-poor than ever, we are using technology to come
up with ever more sophisticated ways to waste time. Take social media as an
example. I’m not a great Twitter user and only follow 12 other users, mostly
trade magazines. Even so, my Twitter feed of yesterday included 172 tweets with
fewer than 9% of any interest.
What of
Facebook? Again, I’m not a heavy user but there were 73 threads on my Facebook page
of which 23% were of interest. I opened only 40% of my emails: the rest,
including those in the Junk folder, were deleted unread. Of those I opened, 10%
were from LinkedIn but I probably only clicked on three or four stories of
which, possibly two were of real interest. I still feel compelled to go through
all the headings just in case.
It seems the
price of all the benefits of instantaneous communication is time spent
shovelling all the dross out of our computer systems. Maybe one day somebody
will come up with a program that can monitor everything that comes through and
be taught to filter out the useless stuff from every source.
Whoever comes
up with that will make a fortune.
Originally published in Conference News
No comments:
Post a Comment