Going without Comms to get a better connection

Took the Easter weekend off to go hiking in the Lake District, and - with some trepidation - turned off all comms until arriving back yesterday evening. It is well worth doing, I've come to the conclusion that the "always on" culture fills ones head with a clutter of fairly unimportant things - driving a "continuous partial attention" mode that can potentially block the ability to see the bigger picture, or the main strands of any issue.

Its been quite interesting to come back this morning and read Techmeme for example - in one way everything has changed since last week, in another way nothing has. As you read it, a plethora of small things immediately pop up, jostling for position in the headspace. But last week it was another plethora of small things, and this week they are all gone. Which one of them changed the world in the last week? None, of course. You realise that it is possible to totally over-react without thought or reflection (see Clay Shirky's latest post explaining this with #Amazonfail for example) whereas a bit of constructive ignoring it would probably be far better.

Similarly, The News - after reading Dan Garner's book "Risk", I've come to understand that all media specialises in stories that are Now! Big! Risk! Fear! because nothing gets our caveman juices going faster - and thus gets our attention - than the tugging of our strings by the modern equivalents of Lion-In-The-Grass moments. But you come back off the mountains, and guess what - despite millions of acres of newsprint and TV watching hours expended, the big picture hasn't wavered at all - but I personally feel a darn site better because I haven't been given 10 new things to worry about before breakfast for the last few days.

OK, OK, I hear you say - thats all standard back-from-holiday stuff, whats it got to do with Tech/Media/Telecoms strategy - where are you going with this?

Firstly, that the always on world throws such a cornucopia of crap at you that its much harder to actually see whats going on. To use the mountain analogy - one of the reasons I suspect you do feel "on top of the world" is that you do get to see the big picture - your brain has a "metadata moment" as ot were. All the little villages etc are laid out below, you see how they interconnect, you can see how the land lies and so you instinctively understand how systemically the whole thing fits together. It means once you are down in the valleys and visibility is no more than round the next bend, you do actually "get" how it all fits together.

Secondly, that the modern comms ecosystem by and large rewards empty vessels making a lot of noise. I said nothing on this blog for nearly a week, nothing on Twitter, nothing on any medium. Guess what - traffic on the blog is down, rate of new followers on Twitter is down, Technorati links are declining (hugley - they must have had another rejigging of the system). OMFG! - I'm losing out in the race to grab attention! And yet, I now realise that the right approach, systemically speaking, is that if you have nothing new to say just to shut up and not add noise to signal. But that isn't going to happen due to the reward system, so you need to find a way to attenuate the noise

Which of course brings one to Filtering and the critical emerging role of the filter in todays comms ecosystems. We are already getting filtering of the "river of news" - Techmeme filters for example - but what is increasingly required is context based metafiltering, the ability to apply the "Top of Mountain" view that says that when correctly viewed, this Shiny! Now! Fear! thing is actually just another little blob on a path, like those cars are just shiny little dots going a long a road with many in front, many behind it etc.

So there you have it - the next big big thing will be filters that work like mountains. You heard it here first

Update - good continuation of the discussion on Nic Brisbourne's blog

Update II - as ever, Deirdre Molly has beaten me to this and has a really good post from SXSW 2008 and a host of links over here

Update III - Poppy Dinsey skewers me well with this link