Social media culture

Food for thought from Toddi Gutner for Business2Community:

 

I found this piece particularly interesting and wanted to call your attention to it. It's one of those things we all experience everyday, but do we really stop to ask ourselves this question:

 

****Are You Mobilizing Communities or Just a Voice in the Crowd?

 

I've personally covered events online, tweeting the main points live and although I was able to filter and capture the essence of what was going on, I had to go back and really absorb the information and then try to apply it to my business effectively. (not always an easy task) :-)

 

It's a juggling act but one I think we're all experiencing on one level or another.

 

Excerpt:

 

Continuous Partial Attention (CPA) is the process of paying simultaneous but superficial attention to a number of sources of incoming information.

 

This term, coined by writer and consultant Linda Stone in 1998, aptly describes the scene at the recent Council of Public Relations Firms Critical Issues Forum on Social Revolution:

 

This is what particularly caught my attention:

 

**What was the unintended consequence (UC) - these being outcomes that are not intended by a purposeful action?

 

**They can be positive, negative or have a perverse effect contrary to what was originally intended.

 

 

****So are there any unintended consequences to compulsively tweeting from an event or otherwise?

 

This is a question I have yet to answer. It is sort of like waiting to see what the side effects of a drug will be years after it has been approved.

 

One UC of CPA may be that peoples’ attention spans (already truncated by USA Today and sound bite television) and

 

**related ability for analytic thought will be reduced to nanoseconds.

 

I'd love to hear your Thoughts?

 

Curated by Jan Gordon covering "Content Curation, Social Media and Beyond"

 

Read the full article: [http://bit.ly/vNC1cn]

Via janlgordon, Shirley Williams (XeeMe.com/ShirleyWilliams)