The Choice To Turn It Off

Two things strike me about the technology revolution underway today; 1) we’ve never before, in the history of humanity, been able to communicate like we do today and 2) we made the choice to participate in all these media channels we have available.

Email, Facebook, Bebo, Chat, Instant Messenger, television, radio, newspapers, magazines, books, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube; exist because we chose to use them. Enough people made that choice that they become commonplace.

As a result, today we feel our attention incredibly divided. I call it the “90 Second Economy” as everything happens in such small bytes of information. We, the people, made a choice to participate and to consume. My company measure this stuff everyday; and there’s lots out there.

We also have another choice: Decide when to turn it off and what media channels we want to and don’t want to, use.

I decided over a year ago, in part due to the insight of Chris Brogan, to limit my participation to my company blog and this blog and OK, one other, to Facebook just for friends, Twitter and an aggregator via FriendFeed. Photo’s on Flickr and videos on YouTube. I have lots of other accounts, but rarely interact with them; it would just not be possible.

So what about you? Do you exercise your choice to turn it off as well?