I’m not here- but I am Twittering

June 26, 2008 · Filed Under Internet Media, Psychology, Work · Comment

At the recent PDF Conference in New York, Arianna Huffington faced the audience and said, “I want you to listen to me.”

What she meant was, stop multi-tasking for a second. Stop Twittering, blogging, IM-ing, catching up on email, or reading Gawker and listen. We all hear, we’re adept at hearing and performing actions at the same time. But listening is different, and at the modern tech or political conference structure listening is out of style. Like she often does, she referenced her two teenage daughters, who according to Arianna are always online, multitasking, and sometimes think their mom doesn’t get it. What Arianna–who gets it so thoroughly it’s staggering– meant was, her daughters aren’t present. Few of us are.

The conference was fabulous but it seemed nobody listened. The entire interplay happened not in the meeting rooms, but on Twitter. At some point the Twittering grew so self-referential that those on a panel referred not to each other or to the audience but to the giant Twitter page displayed on a screen above.

The conference closed, appropriately, with a “Twitter song.”

I realized I haven’t been fully present at work in years. I rarely listen in meetings, on phone calls, at conferences, and nor does anyone else I know. It’s not so much that Google culture has made my stupider (a la the Atlantic monthly article). It’s that I am distracted. Dave Winer wrote a great post about how un-useful most conferences are boring and unilateral (only fun for the panel) and so that’s why people space out in the audiences. I think most of us have too many options to keep busy in our virtual lives, and so we prefer to do that.

In so doing, we don’t process any information. We hear it, and post it immediately. We lose the valuable thing that happens when we are confronted with information and then have to break it down, understand what it means, and re-frame. Cogitating- it’s a dying art.

Tags: pdf2008