Do you want more or less?

Steve Rubel wrote a great post on his blog today about the how the huge increase in new media clamoring for our attention is bogging us down and how, in order to cope, we’ve developed a defence machanism – what Linda Stone calls Continuous Partial Attention. I know I’ve sometimes felt like that when I miss a day of reading my rss feeds and then when I get back to it, there are 300+ new items to read.

Steve continues to explain how the content industry has started to chunk things down into smaller more manageable pieces, which is great and should serve as an example to marketers. I know I’ve often heard people requesting shorter blog posts, quicker podcasts; less content, more often.

So that’s where we come to Twitter. If you haven’t heard of it yet, go check it out. Essentially it allows you to write shorter and quicker posts more easily via your IM client while asking you the question, What are you doing?

Can’t think of the best way to put accross my thoughts on this, so I’ll just list them in point form:

Thought 1: I totally agree that chunking content into shorter more manageable pieces is great considering the shear load of it out there each, taking up every valuable moment if my life, but I’m really worried about the more often part.

Thought 2: I feel really important for content consumers in todays day and age to learn the critical skill of filtering content.

Thought 3: I still sometimes prefer long thoughtful and thought provoking posts, that offer deep insights and practical case studies and stories. Quality vs Quantity.

Thought 4: The complexity of what we learn through the volume of content consumption can be counter productive, unless we have the time to properly assimilate the information and properly think about it and what it means to you.

Though 5: People need to learn to slow down. And that slowing down doesn’t necessarily mean falling behind.