I don’t think there’s been a time when it was as apparent as it is now that people in this country — myself included — have become hypermaniacs who can’t take their eyes off from a 5-second refresh-rate screen.
Yes, I blame The Web for the economic downturn.
This week Time magazine wrote about a study by a Princeton psychologist, Hadley Cantril, who years ago posited that “social panics occur when large groups can’t discern reliable sources of advice from unreliable ones”.
I mean, how true is this nowadays, when we have such an information overload on a real time basis. Who to believe? Scoble or Cramer?
We have a bunch of CEOs and VCs twittering away, we have a CNN-like Snackr scroll of 300 blogs where people can’t discern if we’re in a recession or not, we have the Google Finance real time stock charts or, worst, TD Waterhouse flickering on our laptop; it’s getting so hard to know who to believe, that when we hear more or less something resembling real news, we all run like headless sheep running around panicked.
We need to stop and breathe.
Think about it — the global economy is based on our individual gut feelings.
If you “feel” like we are in a recession, and twit/blog/digg-shout about it, guess what? It’ll spread like wildfire. If you have 5,000 followers, multiply that effect by 10,000.
What we need is to calm the fuck down and think before we write, because there is such thing as the domino effect and the butterfly effect and all those others.
We owe it to our communities to be direct, data backed and centered.
And not to speak from our gut.
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Now that’s an interesting thought – and well worked out too. It’s true that information travels faster on the internet, but also that it creates a louder buzz. Resonance is huge when a news item or a sentiment is amplified over a thousand social network profiles.
Great blog, good thoughts, lovely writing. Cheers.
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