David Coleman, a guest contributor here at Get Real, recently posted a piece entitled Too Much Collaboration. In it he sides with those who are viewing what is going on in the Internet from the information technology or communications theory perspective: bits or information are flying through the pipes, and we have all these messages or bits or information splatting against our eyeballs, demanding our attention. He quotes a long list of those in favor of decreasing our connectedness for the sake of personal productivity. For example, Carl Honore, journalist and author of "In Praise of Slowness," who, as he summarizes, states that "digital communications that were supposed to make working lives run more smoothly are actually preventing people from getting critical tasks accomplished."

Personally, I reject the notion that what we are doing today on the Internet was supposed to increase personal productivity or even getting critical tasks accomplished, no matter what may have been the motivations of those who are building the software or paying our salaries. What people are doing is building richer social connections, which directly and indirectly contribute to them having a richer life. That may translate into more wisdom, better insights, and at times, faster response to critical events, but it doesn't in general mean more personal productivity. In fact, I made this argument recently, in a piece called Linda Stone at Supernova: Continuous Partial Attention...

People are overwhelmed with information, if they operate on an information basis: too many RSS feeds, too many channels, too many choices. That leads to anxiety, yes. But there is never too much meaning, too much insight, too much understanding. So shifting over to a socialized means of filtering the world instead of the information model decreases anxiety: I trust those that I am connected to to help me make sense of the world. And for that to work, I must adopt a communitarian attitude: my time is truly not my own. It is a shared space, a commons in which I interact with my buddies, where we live.

This does not require a return to full attention, one-thing-at-a-time processing of the world. Yes, you rely on trust -- trusted contacts -- but Linda seems to suggest that we will be able to leave the filtering to others: to trust concierges, protectors, leaders. Personally, I don't want to yeild sense making to leaders any more.

David seems to misread this argument. In his piece, he characterizes my viewpoint as leaving the filtering of the world to others, to diminish information flow in some way:

Basically, he believes that your social networks are your filter for information overload. If A likes it and I like and trust A, then I should like it. I agree with Stowe to a point, in that social networks only deal with part of the problem. I do not believe that you will be able to filter enough through these networks to stop the overwhelm of your bandwidth for both information and attention.

I never said that, nor intended it. (It's weird to be misinterpreted at your own blog.) I didn't mean that my network filters information for me, but that my network leads me to a wide variety of activities, issues, and perspectives. It's not like a giant news digest service. I guess if you still believe that the authoritative voice on topics of importance to you is the mass media, then it sounds like a new digest service. But I meant something quite different: my network is where the authorative voices are on the things that matter to me. They are the ones making the "news" with regard to what I care about. And that can be the case for everyone, I believe.

David has bought in on the personal productivity mantra -- that the value of something is solely measured by its increasing the speed at which we do our own tasks, independent of the world we are enmeshed in. I maintain that personal productivity is not generally interesting to us, personally, as individuals, but is used by others, employers and so on, to evaluate us -- erroneously -- against some impersonalized metric.

But the social perspective is different: I am interested in the progress that others in my network are making, too. I am happy to accept an interrupt from a buddy, asking my opinion on how to podcast, or responding to a questions, or brainstorming a proposal I may have nothing to do with. Because I know that I will require that same willingness to help, at a later date.

This is the price -- and value -- of accepting the social side of connectedness. We are not information processing units plugged into a network of machines: we are people, interacting through online social networks. If you want to pretend we are machines, and that throughput is the only way to measure the value of connectedness, you are missing the entire point.

I am not concerned with the 'overwhelm' of information and attention like David and the Sunday supplement pundits he names seem to be. I have adopted continuous partial attention as a meaningful strategy for remaining connected in a much larger social scene that would be suggested by my tiny, tiny office. I switch from task to task, from IM to telephone, from this interrupt to that, and slowly get back to the list of things I am plugging away on. Yes, things slip from today to tomorrow, but an equal number of things slip from tomorrow, or never, into today. And that slippage is not waste, it is not loss of productivity, it is exactly the interaction with others that makes all this worth doing in the first place.

Gandhi said "we have to be the change we want in the world." It you want the world to be filled with hyper-efficient robots, obsessively focused on getting their own tasks done at the expense of others' progress, never veering off to look at a friend's new project, or to answer a colleague's question, then by all means, please be that sort of person. I promise I won't add you to my buddy list. However, if you'd like the world to be a warm, engaging place, where you are surrounded and connected to hundreds of people who believe that your presence matters, and who actively seek your advice and input on issues that are important, then you can switch over to living a connected life. Forget the information overload hyperbole, or the new terror tactic: attention overload.