Connectivity isn’t the problem. You are.

Posted on September 25, 2012 by LenKendall • 3 Comments

A recent New York Times piece titled, “The Joy of Quiet” implies that Americans are too connected for our own good. Apparently we are constantly distracting ourselves with new information and that, “we have more and more ways to communicate, but less and less to say.”

Author Pico Iyer makes a very solid point in this post about needing to give ourselves time to think, but I think he places too much of the blame on our connectivity, and not enough on our personal decisions while in that state of connectedness.

I highly encourage you to read the full post here. I’ll wait…

Iyer makes several points, but the one I take most issue with is that we are becoming a less creative society because of our inability to disconnect from the constant stream of information that we’re consuming and producing. The current trend (solution) to this “problem” seems to be removing ourselves from everything digital. That by going analog and isolating ourselves from such stimuli, we will be more likely to have creative thoughts.

Everyone has their own methods for creativity of course, but do the majority of us really spawn original thinking by depriving our minds of new things?

My hypothesis is that most of us benefit more from the Medici Effect of thinking. The larger the diversity of art, ideas, people, and experiences we expose ourselves too, the more likely it is that we’ll find unique intersections which lead to amazing new remixes and inventions.

People have a very active choice in what exactly they’re spending their time being connected to. What they read. Who they talk to. Where they consume information. All of these things are completely in our control. Our biggest problem is not overexposure itself, but rather the content we’re exposing ourselves to.

Removing yourself from the digital world is a band-aid. Shifting your behavior to interact with ideas and people that are more mentally stimulating (than your current state) is a means to spurring a more creative you. You don’t need time to think, you need time to execute on your thoughts.

The image above this blog post implies a certain kind of content is a waste of your time. I don’t want to go into the right and wrong types of connectivity you should participate in, but I will however make a few recommendations:

1) Change and add to your news sources often.

2) Read non-fiction offline and online with Wikipedia readily available. You’ll go down a wonderful rabbit-hole of learning.

3) Use discovery tools/sites like Kippt, Reddit, and Digg to seek out new categories of content to dig into.

4) Try to recreate or remix tangible objects that you find on visual networks (Pinterest). The process of copying can reveal new and better ways to make things.

5) Don’t lock yourself away in a dungeon. This is a horribly inefficient way to be creative.

http://twitter.com/benkunz Ben Kunz

Back in the 1990s before I went into marketing, I worked as a newspaper editor. One night early in that job, I saw an AP wire report about an earthquake in South America, and excitedly suggested we run the story in the World News section. Another editor shook his head and explained that globally, there is an earthquake somewhere in the world every 15 minutes. It took me months before I learned not to hyperactively react to every “breaking story” that popped up from the wires.

While the frequency of stimuli is higher today, however, I don’t believe our time slacking off with entertainment has increased. Consumers spent hours daily watching television in the 1960s and 70s, and before that radio, and before that newspapers. How many children recall their dads zoning out with the paper before him. My own father, an intellectual blue-collar worker, used to spend evenings reading Encyclopedia Britannica.

Humans have an instinctual need to relax by taking in content. We’ve changed the formats and added more clutter. As always, the challenge is filtering to improve either the entertainment value or knowledge quality.

The test of a man or woman is not whether they relax by taking content in, but what they do with that downtime.
- http://twitter.com/LenKendall Len Kendall
  
  Your last sentence nailed it. I think the act of taking in content is very human and needed, but that stimuli can come from a variety of sources and some of those sources may be far more valuable to us. A perfect form of consumption (in my mind) is one that engages are emotions AND the parts of our brain’s used for learning. The latter being most useful for building up a bank of ideas and facts that can lead to creative thinking in the future.
  - http://twitter.com/goonth Gunther Sonnenfeld
    
    Reading this exchange I can’t help but think about the shortcomings of “gamification” and where “collaborative consumption” or “collaborative entertainment” still haven’t found their sea legs. The downtime @twitter-4266261:disqus speaks of is absolutely critical, and the question becomes one of strict toiling: do we need to be induced or coerced to spend our time more meaningfully? Further to that, what happens to content in that process? To @twitter-9981522:disqus’s point, I think this begs an even greater prospect, which is that we will need to completely reinvent our learning or cognitive processes to even consider what’s possible with what we choose (or don’t choose) to consume…