Twitter

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

This video was made by Smigly, a talented animator that creates videos about many cultural trends and problems we face as a society. The video illustrates how there is so much information overload going on in our heads, especially from social media, that we can’t tap into the ‘power of now’ and stay in the moment. It shows a man that is constantly distracted by the masses of media in his life and can’t focus. He’s simply exhausted while his mind is turning into mush. He is trying to read a book about ‘staying in the now’ but thoughts of tweets and facebook images and Youtube videos keep popping in his head.

This is probably a video that resonates with most people who are on the net every day, and especially ones who tap into social media sites and read blogs such as this particularly fabulous one. Our human brain only has a certain bandwidtch and we have a limited attention span when it comes to mixing social media into our lives. We are living in an age where social networks and blogs and news feeds are creating so much noise in our heads that it’s hard to concentrate on one thing at a time.

What’s the solution to becoming overwhelmed with the day to day frenzy of social media? Maybe you know. Please share some ideas of how you’re able to defeat the power of information overload from consuming your attention span.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

“The key idea behind the knol project is to highlight authors. Books have authors’ names right on the cover, news articles have bylines, scientific articles always have authors — but somehow the web evolved without a strong standard to keep authors names highlighted. We believe that knowing who wrote what will significantly help users make better use of web content.”

Google’s approach to collaborative knowledge sharing is interesting and somewhat different to Wikipedia. (Remember, Wikipedia writers (largely) remain anonymous and open until proven named.) The idea of a completely open, authoritative and relevant information directory has consequences outside of what was originally intended, especially coming from the “pure” and “do-good” Google. Om Malik believes this is a further, definitive step toward a Google monopoly:

“Whether it will be successful or not, remains to be seen. Now if you think about it, knol despite its fancy name is nothing but a classic move by a quasi-monopolist who wants to ensure that they keep getting the raw material (in this case content on knols) for free, so that they can keep selling it at a premium. I stopped believing in Google’s “do no evil” ethos a long time ago….”

But for what it’s worth, the Google kingdom has been righteous and beneficial to many, especially those of the academy. (Think IT support and generous/intuitive email systems across campuses.) Imagine what will happen within the hierarchy of information at a university with the advancement of knols. Students and professors can continue the conversation from the classroom to the knol and then collaborate with others the world over. The knol architecture (as seen here) will offer a robust learning experience that creates a unique social dynamic.

Wikipedia will still be Wikipedia but the knol will become academia’s new best friend.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.