Will the New Facebook Lead to Information Overload?

Soren Gordhamer is the organizer of the Wisdom 2.0 Conferences, which brings together staff from Google, Facebook, Twitter and Zynga along with Zen teachers and others to explore living with awareness and wisdom in our modern age. You can follow him at @SorenG on Twitter.

If you’ve been spending much time on the new Facebook, you’ve likely been asking, “Do I really care that my friend just listened to Lady Gaga on Spotify? Is this worth my attention?”

Facebook, of course, is insisting that you do care.

SEE ALSO: 10 Facebook Timeline Designs That Will Blow You Away [PICS]

We have moved into a new era of sharing. With it comes the opportunity to better know the interests and activities of friends and family on a moment-to-moment basis. At the same time, so much utterly overwhelming information has the possibility to destroy the beauty of the platform.

Possibly at no other time has the question, “Just what is the purpose of social media?” been more relevant.
From the Intentional to the Automatic

With new Facebook we are seeing a shift from the Intentional (“Wow, this is an awesome song. I’d really like to share it with my friends.”) to the Automatic (Many of your actions, such as listening to a song, are posted without your direction.). Don’t take this shift lightly; it’s potentially a game changer, though in what direction is uncertain.

The Ticker streams our friends’ activities in our face like never before. This activity will surely expand as automatic posting applications multiply. Facebook is anticipating that more of such content will encourage more engagement, but is it a big risk?
The Balance Between Relevant and Irrelevant Content

The potential danger is that there will be too much information to make the site useful. It sets up an increasing flood of content, making it more difficult than ever to find what is relevant. The shift forces more people to ask, “How much of my own time do I want to spend reading about the activities of someone else’s life?”

Reports show that more and more people are feeling overwhelmed by technology, and a recent National Sleep Foundation study found that a whopping 63% of Americans say their sleep needs are not being met during the week. We may be increasingly connected, but that does not mean that our quality of life necessarily improves.

It’s not likely we will see a mass exodus from Facebook in the coming months, but people will need to spend more time and effort weeding through irrelevant information. The service may increasingly tax our attention and patience.
Why Facebook Has Never Been Free

It’s important to realize that there is a cost to social sites like Facebook. Recent posts rumored that Facebook planned to charge users for maintaining accounts. Others countered that Facebook would always be free. However, Facebook has never been free, at least, not since it began displaying ads. We pay for Facebook with our attention.

Even though most of us try to avoid the ads that appear on the side, we don’t. If we were all masters at ignoring ads, businesses would stop displaying them.

I have nothing against an ad-supported site, but the quality of content needs to be high enough to outweigh the intrusion of advertisements (which seems to be increasing). My time is worth it.
The New Era: A Question of Attention

Our handheld devices allow sharing in ways few of us could have imagined five years ago. In less than 15 seconds, we can upload a mobile photo to all our online friends. This is both a blessing and a curse, and poses enormous challenges that the social media of today must address.

I’m guessing you, like me, find yourself asking, “Just how much information about that high school acquaintance do I really need?” Of all the things we can dedicate attention to – exercising, spending time with our children or family, reading a book – why spend it on social media? What purpose does it serve?

In a broad stroke, the answer is that it must strengthen, not decrease, the quality of our lives. Therefore, simply increasing the quantity of information about our friends is not the answer. In the short term, pageviews may increase as people try to keep up with the increased content, but inevitably there is only so much time and attention we can spare. The question of relevancy will become evermore important.

So, while there may be no financial cost in spending time with social media, in many ways we pay with something far more valuable: our attention. How we dedicate attention is essentially how we choose to spend the limited heartbeats of our lives. This is a lesson the social networks of our time would benefit from.