See, Speak, Hear No Evil Challenge

If a programming genie gave me three wishes for a Facebook or mobile phone application, I would ask for only one: A Noise Discernment application.

Here’s what the application would do:

1. Allow user to preset goals and interest; any information coming in is filtered and screened based on settings. Settings can be changed at anytime.

2. Application would rate and determines tone; anything classified as gossip, spamming, or negativity gets filtered out.

3. When you “friend” someone, you get to  privately rate how  important the relationship is to you and set communication reminder triggers based on desired frequency of interaction. Think of it this way:  You “friend” someone you are really interested in learning more about and making a valuable connection with, if you are not seeing their updates the chances for interaction, conversation, and relationship building might never happen. Wouldn’t it be nice to get a reminder to reach out to them or receive a scheduled summary of their updates?

Until social networking development companies understand the need to marry psychology and sociology to technology, it is up the user to muddle through the overload and noise pollution of useless/mindless information. How can we do this? Take the See, Speak, Hear No Evil Social Media Challenge. Try one or more of the following:

  • Set Goals. Nothing new about this concept, yet it is completely necessary today. The more capable you are at understanding what is important to you, the better you will be able to determine how to spend your time, filter information and understand who you need in your social network.
  • Stand for Quality vs. Quantity – Take the time to clean out your social networking accounts and apply some standards for communication and connecting.
  • Rewind and Be Kind. – Do we say the same things with the same tone in a text, email or online that we would say in person? Humor is great, sarcasm can hurt people, take the time to rewind and think about your words before posting.  Kindness is Cool; pay it forward and spread the word. If we think mutual, our actions will reflect this. Let’s use social media tools for collaboration and innovation and be conscious of noise and information pollution.