Your friends are being so noisy!
Let’s start this with an analogy. Think of a standard analogue radio, a little portable one like the type you used to get in cars or sitting on the window sill of the kitchen. The type with the little wheel-dial and you had to physically tune in the frequency that you wanted to listen to.
As you went through the frequencies you heard lots of static and noise that nobody wanted to listen to, you would get to ClassicFM which isn’t your cup of tea and then, eventually, you got to Radio 1 and the music you wanted to hear.
Social media is a bit like this. There is lots and lots of different frequencies and static and content out there, most of which is irrelevant to us as an individual. The vast amounts of information available is chaotic (although powerful) and it is extremely hard to search and discover topics, events or trends — or in other words, anything useful.
All of this irrelevant content is “noise” and it stops us from seeing the content we really want to see.
Everything we do has a goal
Whether or not you realise it consciously, every moment of every day, every action — you are pursuing a goal. It might be something trivial such as entertaining yourself with your friends’ Facebook updates or something a little more pressing like meeting that deadline for your monthly report on Friday.
Information that is presented to us whether on social media, through apps or offline such as through TV, should be evaluated against the goals we have at that point.
Is the information:
- Perfectly relevant to our current goal
- Useful information that we can store away for a future goal
- Completely useless information that doesn’t fit either #1 or #2
If the answer is ever number 3, then this is noise. It has no value to you.
It’s a personal thing
For this reason noise is a completely personal thing and very biased, as people are looking for different types of information via various channels. You or I might not be interested in the latest makeup range from MAC Cosmetics, but your girlfriend or sister are probably trawling the web looking for the best prices on them.
In a sense then, everything is noise, until we as an individual assign value to it at which point it ceases to be noise for us and becomes information we are actually interested in.
Our friends are extremely noisy
So here is a couple of questions for you, and I want you to answer honestly with yourself:
We love our friends, but do we love everything they post?
How many times have you sat looking through your Facebook timeline frustrated with all the rubbish you are seeing that has absolutely no value to you?
This is the irony of social media. Platforms such as Facebook or Instagram are built to show us what our friends want to publish, not necessarily what we want to see.
