The twitter is beginning to sound a bit strangulated now. Like a flock of birds flying through a cloud of grapeshot.

Hugh Macleod’s cartoon sending up Twitter mania

It seems both Hugh Macleod (the gaping void — see cartoon above) and Robert Scoble are coming off Twitter, that maddeningly insistent waster of time for busy professionals who regularly protest about email-overload but tweet happily throughout the day to thousands of “followers”. Jeremy Wright too has whipped the twittering hierglyphics off his blog. At last sense has returned to the Techmeme crowd.

It’s becoming clear that the much derided New York Times article last Sunday, which pictured exhausted bloggers stumbling to early graves, has had an effect. Here at Syntagma we responded to the piece by suggesting a flight from Twitter as a first step to sanity.

Does anyone in real life speak in batches of 140 characters? I thought not. It’s so obviously an artificial way of communicating. And the way each twit begins with @fredbloggs as if a gun is being fired at his head, is very disconcerting.

The whole thing has got out of hand and GapingVoid’s cartoon gets it in a nutshell.

Suddenly, there’s a raft of blog posts pointing out changes in the blogosphere caused by its dumb lovechild, social networking. Some bloggers are even heading for the exit. Here’s a quick roundup :

Hugh Macleod of Gaping Void make this interesting point about thought leadership, one of the traditional drivers of the tertiary blogosphere : “Suddenly, social networks start being successfully created without the ‘A-Listers’ having to act like ‘Hubs’ [or 'Human Social Objects', if you want to get REALLY technical]. Suddenly, the need for A-listers to arbitrate ‘Who the Cool Kids are’ [and who they aren't] is rapidly and thankfully diminished.!”

Robert Scoble has a go too : “One trend that bloggers don’t want to talk about? A number of my blogging friends have seen their traffic go down lately. They assume that their readers are off in social networks. I think they are absolutely right.”

So traffic is moving from relatively coherent writerly patterns to the kind of bullet point messages we used to send in telegrams.

Rex Hammock highlights the dumb-down effect of social networking : “When you set up a Facebook account, you’re not weighted down with the responsibility of being a publisher or writer or pundit or whatever it is that keeps most people from setting up a blog.”

Goddam those writers, publishers and pundits! What do they know? Let’s all babble together!

David Jaffe, a games designer and blogger sighs : “I’m going to go dark. … For me, it’s always been silly, stupid fun…you know, giving what I get, talking like alot of folks on geeky message boards do, trash talking, etc.”

Is this a trend? Well, I’ve been writing this stuff for ages here on Syntagma — which ceased being a blog yonks since.

The catalyst for all this angst, of course, is the unstoppable rush to social networks, like Twitter, Facebook and now Pownce. Geeks genuinely feel they have to keep up with this trend or they’ll be left stranded behind the curve. Kids just have to do it or get confined to social outer darkness. All this crosses over the endless debates about “new media” (I prefer “popular media”) and the mainstream media, the future of newsprint … etcetera.

Personally, I’ve always thought that the medium matters less than we suppose, assuming it doesn’t carry some self-limiting factor, like 140-character max output range, in which case it’s unfit for most purposes.

For example, some newspapers incorporate an occasional poetry spot, where decent poets can publish their verses. Does that make the poet a journalist? If writers use blog platforms to publish the kind of article that could easily appear in a broadsheet paper or specialist magazine, does that make them bloggers?

The medium isn’t the message, the quality and form of the writing, or broadcasting is. Good reportage is just that, wherever it appears. So is commentary. So is any other form of expression. We’ve been confusing the medium with the message for too long — since Marshall Mcluhan in fact.

Nowadays, shopping lists, quick notes, annotations, reminders, and so on are rapidly becoming the discourse of choice in the online world. Even A-Listers are getting dragged into it. Coherence is losing out to the babble of Babel. Quality to quantity.

Rex Hammock talks of “the responsibility of being a publisher or writer or pundit …” Naturally, this isn’t for everyone. The idea that everyone has a novel in them, or could be a published author, was never a runner. In any originative profession, only 5 percent of aspiring entrants ever truly succeed. Some bloggers use their blogs as their identity, promoting consultancy work or their offline writing.

What particularly interests me is online content production. We shouldn’t confuse this with instant messaging, which is what the social networks are doing. You don’t IM an op-ed on world economic prospects.

Content production is done for two reasons :

1. As hobby, amateur production, fun.
2. As a professional activity aimed at financial returns.

People often start out as #1 practitioners then, if they think they’re good enough, they might move on to #2.

That’s where most of the people engaged in this debate are. They are pros in an increasingly amateurish media space. That’s why there are now dozens of books getting into print, like The 4-Hour Workweek and Andrew Keen’s tirade against the negative effects of popular media, The Cult of the Amateur.

The way to survive all this hype and arm-twisting is The Low Information Diet, severely limiting your consumption of news and gibberish, and concentrating ferociously on what matters to you. If it’s income you’re after, productivity and targeting are the keynotes of performance.

It’s true, though, that most of us like to sound off about this and that — join the “conversation”, as it’s called. But the conversation is largely spurious unless you’re doing it for genuine economic or social reasons, in which latter case you’d be better off in the real world.

If you’re an originative intellectual worker on the internet, discipline and focus are the watchwords. Anything else is professional suicide.

I’ve noticed that a number of people are scheduling particular walks for taking photos of their town or city. Robert Scoble has named the idea “Photowalking” on the principle perhaps that everything should have a name.

The Quay, Exeter

I’ve been Photowalking — combining taking pictures with my morning five-mile walk — ever since I bought a digital camera last year. It’s a great way to add value to mere exercise. My project — I’ll call it PhotoExeter — is to photograph the city I live in through this summer, trying to capture the face and atmosphere of it when it looks its best, and is filled with tourists. You can see the results so far by clicking the Flickr logo at the top of the sidebar.

After a brilliant March and April, we’ve had six weeks of wet and windy weather here, so no Photowalking. In fact, the whole country has been under the cosh. As I write, people are losing their lives across the Midlands of England in the worst flooding for years.

Back to Photowalking. It’s really a great extension to Fatblogging because it keeps the interest up on what might be dreary rambles across familiar ground. As I walk, I find myself noticing things, large and small, that might otherwise have passed unseen. I also take many detours I’ve never explored before — maybe an 18th-century street straight out of a Dickens novel. The fact is, Photowalking insists you walk farther, if not faster, than you otherwise would.

As someone who used to run marathons, I know that interest is crucual to exercise. A date with a race a month or so ahead, seeking to beat your personal best, or a slightly better runner going along with you.

But Photowalking beats even personal ambition as a spur to distance travelled. For it drags in different parts of the brain. If exercise utilizes the left-brain — all those time calculations and forecasts along the way — then Photowalking adds curiosity, perspective, artistic appreciation of views and architecture, and delving into historical information. Classic right-brain stuff.

I’m only sorry I have to write about it today. The rain is beating down outside my window like stair-rods, and Photowalking is out of the question.

It’s back to blogging, I suppose. Oh, the tedium!

I’ve been pondering on this for over a week now as it ties in with much of what I’ve been writing and thinking about for many years.

The low information diet is a neat phrase — and concept — used in Timothy Ferriss’s new book, The 4-Hour Workweek, which I reviewed here a couple of weeks ago. It also sings from the same hymn sheet as another book, Mediated — How the Media Shape Your World, which I also reviewed here some months since.

Information is the bane of our lives. It pursues us everywhere, via billboards and Blackberrys, cell phones and laptops. Information never stops, it seeps into our brains, jams out all useful activity and crashes any tendency to creativity. Most of it is useless, irrelevant, biassed, deceitful, deceptive and damaging to our health.

Do I like information? I love it. We all do. But, like alcohol and drugs, it’s monumentally counter-productive unless consumed in tiny doses at precisely the right time.

The problem is, information makes us feel important, connected, in league with “where it’s at”. If we don’t get any, we’re sure to look inadequate at the XYZ Conference. We never stop to think that the XYZ Conference is just another vehicle for more useless information, as is that so-vital podcast, video hookup or blog post (present post excepted because of its essential nature).

Ferriss’s chapter with the same title as this post is the best eight-page sequence in his book. Alone it will change your life. If you’re a Techmeme groupie or a news junkie — as I used to be — read it and learn about “selective ignorance” and the trial one-week media fast.

Refuse to be mediated, concentrate on that personal task in hand. Only your work and activity is worthy of your attention. Everything else may be relevant to others, but will kill your effectiveness and utility if you indulge in it.

There are many traps to watch out for too. I watched Ferriss being interviewed on the Scoble Show the other day hoping to discover whether the author’s wildly romantic CV had any truth in it and whether he did indeed work only four hours a week. Most of it was driven by Scoble’s interventions pushing some aspect of his own work methods. Unfortunately, it diverted the author onto narrow detail-driven paths that made his ideas seem trite. Like hiring someone in India to triage his email. Now I do know about hiring people to do simple tasks, like writing content, and believe me the time-overhead involved is usually much greater than doing the job yourself — especially if it’s triaging your email.

Outsourcing is rarely the answer because of the admin and the need to train the outsourcee. They will also require supervision to keep them up to standard, billing and paying, accounting and complimenting. It really is not as simple as Ferriss says.

So let’s stick with the low information diet. This is the nub of the matter. Get it right — depending on the source of your income stream — and all else follows.

Draw up a few relevancy charts. Redraw them onto one page and into one box. Eliminate anything even slightly superfluous. Concentrate ferociously on what’s left, but only to the extent that it serves your purpose, and you are beginning to see the light.

It is vain to do with more what can be done with less. William of Occam.

Take Occam’s Razor to everything you do and you won’t go far wrong. Not to do so is to cut your own throat.

Reading, after a certain age, diverts the mind too much from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking. Albert Einstein.