Information, digital marketing, and new digital world

By: Mohammadreza Rostami Rad, October 2015

Recently I have read two articles which explore some interesting information regarding online activities, digital world and sharing and producing knowledge from different point of views.

First article

The first article is “Digital overloaded – seduced by distraction”. Its title simply shows the main idea of this paper. The writer reviewed different items and tries to have a depth looking to reason of distraction and its related subjects.

Errin Anderssen  believes “in the information overloaded world, everybody is trying to grab our attention” and we, ourselves aren’t aware of this valuable asset. Facing with different titles and bombarding by information which are increasing by new technologies and companies simply resulted being distracted. It means something is happening, everybody is trying to grab our attention and also they are worried about our distraction!

Distraction, one of the unknown routines, most of times, we start from some point with a clear goal, and after some hours when we want to finish our search we will be really surprised, because we are somewhere else which we are not supposed to be. During this journey, we are in front of our PC, tablet, cell or any device, and doing surfing web, and different items from different resources which somehow are what we like grabbing our attention and we continue and continue. As matter of fact, “being always on” may look good in society that glorifies busyness, but it is killer intellectually. Why?

The researches

The researches show that during, even opening a simple web page, we breathe slower, our blood pressure will be increased and something internally will happen. These all shows something is wrong. “The behavior is called email or screen apena, a phrase that technology consultant Linda Stone first blogged about in 2008”.

The Technology

Software developer and scientists try to prepare some circumstance that help us to decrease our stress, stay away from distraction and stay focused on what we need. For example developing new sensor by Dr. Moraveji and his crow which is some kind of “ap-based breathing sensor” and supposed to control our breathing, or the software which gather records to show us how we are using the internet  and maybe can optimize our turning around on the web.

The article is finished with these interesting sentences, “Linda Stone suggests the people stop thinking about time management and start thinking about how to better manage their attention – to think about where we need or want our focus to be.”

Second article

During second paper – “Information-rich and attention-poor”, I understood new concerns. Peter Nicholson claims that in information revolution three power play the main role:

-          Computation

-           Data transmission, and

-          Data storage

The result of this revolution and these powers will be increasing capability by about 10 million times since the 1960s.

Information and technology

This huge amount of information has just produced, because of scarcity of human time and attention. It means wasting abundant resources to decrease latency in communication to zero. New technologies such as nanotechnology, are working on new equipment provide storages with a billion years nondegradation.

The knowledge cycle

Economists believe defining and analyzing “knowledge” shows that we can clarify whole knowledge cycle as a “stock” and new knowledge as “flow”. “A stock of knowledge may be thought of as a quasi I permanent repository – such as a book or an entire library – whereas the flow is the process of developing the knowledge.”  In digital world, rate of depreciation is decreased and sometimes it is like just 24 hours. In other words, information products will be obsolete in short time and they are not useable in our fast paced environment and also there is another shift of conceptual authority from “producer of depth to the broader public.”

Now a days, technology helps growing of having access to knowledge much faster, but there is a big challenge, that how they will be effective? The mobilization of “crowd wisdom” makes it powerful just because of new technology of Web that enables existing of the content everywhere. And the most questionable matter in 21th century will be the lack of educated and innovative people the same as Newton.  

“We have started learning more and more about less and less spanning spectrum of different perspective.” The habits are changing, the knowledge and its definitions are changed and “the challenge is to adapt, and then to evolve, in a world where there continues to be an exponential increase in the supply of information relative to the supply of human attention.”

Conclusion

As a digital marketer, knowing that how fast is changing everything and how fast new information is generating and of course how people are distracted, proves that this game is not that easy. Being involved in psychological research, monitoring every movement of our competitors, ability to transfer our message to our potential customer in less than 10 seconds, grab consumer’s attention and so on are some simple samples of the challenges which are needed to be seen during designing a marketing plan and campaigns.

Knowing that different people on our digital channels will be with us just for some seconds is exactly the scary time that we are facing and this element that diversion is distracting people more and more proves that being unique is a questionable desire.