Tuesday 12 June 2007

MTV generation 2.0

Ye Gods! I can wait until the mainstream press picks up on the likes of this malarkey, the coined phrase, at the beginning of its evolution I’m guessing, is ‘The Attention Crash,’ and by god, it’s pretty accurate right at this infantile level.

It revolves around the human capacity to absorb information, and those of us who work in the social media, with computers, marketing, PR, this ethereal environment where so much money flys around, so little gets done, but so much is accomplished. Steve Rubel kicked things off by simply saying;

“We are reaching a point where the number of inputs we have as individuals is beginning to exceed what we are capable as humans of managing. The demands for our attention are becoming so great, and the problem so widespread, that it will cause people to crash and curtail these drains. Human attention does not obey Moore's Law.”


The one thing that always stuck out in my mind about the MTV Gernation, which I’m gladly a part of, was our lack of any sort of decent attention span. Well, fuck me, as I’ve grown and my inputs have kept up, my attention span has drifted to what I think is around 3 or 4 seconds. That’s generally how long I’ll stay looking at one thing, email, blog, twitter, jaiku, facebook, myspace, last.fm, imdb, plazes…the infinite list of social tools. Terrible.

Hugh Macleod obviously had his own succinct opinion on the matter in hand, which as usual also hit the nail on the head.

“Of course, this web-enabled, stressed-out success model isn't anything new. Since the dawn of time, to get anything interesting done in this world pretty much requires one kissing normal life good-bye. This sudden mass overload of input we're constantly witnessing is just one more example of it. One of many. Same as it ever was.”
I think I’m in an interesting position though, as Hugh says, “to get anything interesting done in this world pretty much requires one kissing normal life good-bye,” I’ve pretty much always know the life I’m leading now, although now I’m getting paid for it. Blogging, jumping into technology and the social media, I grew up with it, this fast paced, action packed ride of geekery and hedonism, it is what I do, and have over the last decade (since I was about 13), so it’s no different.

I love it, every minute, apart from my increasingly apparent lack of attention that is, HAH…it’s the future-boyo. So where am I? I work 60 hours a week, I play 50 hours a week and sleep the rest, it’s brilliant, give me more, I want to absorb everything. What are your thoughts? Lunacy or progression? I can't seem to agree with this '4-Hour Workweek' stuff, what the hell am I going to do with the rest of my time if i'm not absorbing information that I like? Play golf? Go fucking swimming with dolphins? FUCK THAT, GIVE ME EVERYTHING ALL AT ONCE. I'll chew it up and ask for seconds, some might that’s young naivety, but I’m fine with that, when the hell else am I going to have the chance to balls up what I’m saying? So there it is.

More tomorrow.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

This is fucking ace. On a good day I have a three second attention span, on a bad day all I can do is have 11 internet explorers open and keep typing different web addresses on each one. Ric this is rapidly turning into a superblog! Keep em coming - obviously I didn't read the whole article but i did spend about six seconds on it and so therefore you have managed to double my daily concentration. What's more, in approximately 66 web-flicks' time I may well be back to read the rest. God love ya Ric - if you've got to the end of my comment that is. Jen