Making Sense
Social technologies… it’s like listening to static coming from anywhere. You are flooded with info. A friend of my daughter’s wrote on twitter: “I’m so f***g distracted”. And so we are. There’s just too much.
The trick is to make sense of it all. Select what you want to read, what you want to know. Be present where you can find value. Participate where it’s worth while. Contribute where it feels right. Give, to maybe some day receive.
Making sense of all the bits and pieces is not easy. To some people the timeline just passes by. Some people want to read everything. But making sense is a creative process in which you compile, connect, consume, convert, construct, contribute and create a hopefully critical view of the world. One that helps you to progress. Not one that paralyses.
An Experiment
I started a discussion group on linkedin on employee engagement (yeah I know, I took a bad technological choice 8 years ago). The group has now 36,000 members. And the risk of this group is that it becomes a cemetery of mass-posted blogs. So to revive the group I sometimes launch a discussion where people actually interact.
The last discussion was on “if there was one thing you could do to boost employee engagement, what would it be?”
There were about 50 contributions coming from Belgium, France, Spain, the US, Malaysia, India, Mexico, the UK, … But it didn’t make sense. It was a stream of input, bits of ideas, … How to make sense.
So I tried to convert that amorphous flow of information into a conversation. As if we were in the room. You can find that summary here.
Learnings
It took some work and it’s an experiment not to be repeated all the time. But it taught me some things.
- To make sense you need to re-structure, reorder, re-assess.
- Making sense is about clustering and selecting.
- Making sense is about judging and interpreting.
- Making sense is about trying to understand what the other meant, empathy.
- Making sense is about integrating what you know, to create something that is more than what you know. The more you know, the more you can make sense.
These are all human cognitive processes. So we need to teach our children not to be passive in the digital world. We need to maybe teach ourselves.
We/They must be active, and critical. What if we/they would look at their Facebook timeline through the lens of sense-making? What if they/we would try and contribute only when it makes sense? What if we/they are able to select what help us/them progress in what they want to do?
Just a morning thought. Think about it. Enjoy the day.
David Ducheyne
Original Post
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/making-sense-social-media-david-ducheyne/
