Getting our information in bits from social media : Can we learn this way?
Sitting with Craig Ball yesterday at the Washington Solo and Small Law Conference, he asked a wonderful question. “Do you think younger people are learning what they really need to know when they are getting their information from bits here and there, mostly shared from ‘friends,’ some in a form as short as 140 characters.” Craig was deeply concerned that our next generation is not going to be prepared for life ahead.
I responded the last few weeks I came to fear the same thing for myself. 90% of the news and information I pick up comes from a combination of feeds in my NewsRack App and my ‘influencers’ and ‘mainstream media’ lists on Twitter. In 45 minute commutes to work and back I browse my feeds, read what I perceive as the good stuff, and share with my Twitter followers the items I most liked that I thought they would have an interest in as well.
I’ve come to realize this condensed way of learning and sharing is re-wiring me. I don’t have the same patience to enjoy a good book — and God knows I’ve downloaded a bunch to my Kindle App on my iPad. After reading a chapter or two I’m apt to say this author is tailing off and I can learn more elsewhere. It’s a struggle to sit down and enjoy the New York Times now that I go to the Times App, skim for the good stuff and share it on Twitter.
I explained to Craig that I do feel that I am learning a lot. It’s allowing me to get more of a grasp on the future so as to guide LexBlog and to help empower our clients to network through the Internet.
By studying who’s sharing the good stuff, browsing the headlines, reading items, keying them into Tweets, and seeing the Tweet on a screen I’m getting multiple points of exposure, and in turn, grasping a great deal of important information.
Craig followed with a good question. “Do you think the fact you learned the old way — in books, classes, being mentored, and oral discussion — better prepared me for digesting information the way I am doing it today? Maybe young people are not going to be as equipped?”
Seth Godin may have the best in his post today, ‘The Management of Signals.’
Dealing successfully with times of change (like now) requires that you simultaneously broaden your reach, focus on what’s important and aggressively ignore things that are both loud and false.
Seth explains there as are are two things we’re going to need to get better at to achieve this.
- Getting accurate signals from the world. Right now, we take in information from many places, but we’re not particularly focused on filtering the information that might be false, and more important, what might be missing.
- Sorting and ranking information based on importance. We often make the mistake of ranking things as urgent, which aren’t, or true, which are false, or knowable, when they’re not.
No question there is a lot of junk out their on the Internet and in social media. Skimming all the stuff from the self proclaimed social media experts recently I couldn’t help but think of Paul Simon’s Kodachrome lyric, “When I think back on all the crap I learned in high school it’s a wonder I can think at all.”
My gut tells me I’m equipped to separate the wheat from the chaff in this new way of learning. Not from school, but from years of experience practicing law, trying cases, working on business deals, and starting businesses of my own.
I learned to learn what I needed to know — from books and from people. I was driven by fear of failure. Failure that would result in me being unable to support my family.
I’m optimistic kids will do the same. They’ll figure out what they need to know and who to learn it from for the same reason as I. Darwinism will weed out those who cannot adapt.