Attention drift: Observations on behavior, and virtual communities

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For the past four years, my pattern has been to get up early, have breakfast, check email, read, blog, and walk the dog, not always in that order. Now, that's changing.

Getting up early, check; walking the dog, check; eating breakfast, check--but I'm not blogging. Instead, I'm checking twitter, frendfeed and my email, then switching to facebook.

At that point, I'm 40 minutes into my allotted hour + 10, so this is definitely a behavior-changing pattern.

Here's where the shifts are I want to note and talk about:
a) Relying on social network connections for news.  Jerry Yang might resign? Someone tweeted the link.

b) Treating discourses more like transactions--getting short snippets of broadcast info from people works well in twitter, friendfeed comments.

c) Email is spam and items that need discussion. Notes on wire frames for a remote project need email--meeting for lunch should not (even if it still does.)

d) Blogging is for sharing longer and more thoughtful items (don't fit in a tweet or a bookmark), and posting digital assets--sound.video, images--that don't fit in a twit or SMS format.

Of course, I am still blogging pretty much daily and wil continue to do so, but I'm probably typical of alot of people for whom the blog(which replaced the newspaper online) is no longer the information source I rush to in the morning--now I go to my virtual communities, where people not only tell me how they are, they tell me what they are paying attention to.

How has your attention shifted? Do you fit this pattern? Have another one? Share, please.



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Susan Mernit
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This page contains a single entry by Susan Mernit published on July 9, 2008 8:35 AM.

Quote of the Day was the previous entry in this blog.

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