"Who cares what you ate for breakfast?" was my first thought when I learned about Twitter during its early days. I thought it was just me. But recently I saw a presentation by technology journalist Clive Thompson, author of Smarter Than You Think: How Technology is Changing our Minds for the Better. And I was heartened to learn that Thompson had a similar reaction when he first started tracking Twitter.
His corollary thought to "why would anyone care what you ate for breakfast" gave me pause. According to Thompson, it really isn't the granular, singular description of your breakfast on Twitter that matters. It's the collective waves and paths of thinking of many people over time that are truly interesting. He says social scientists call this effect of having insight into the larger picture of your network "ambient awareness."
"Each little update--each individual bit of social information--is, on its own, pretty insignificant, even mundane," he writes in Smarter Than You Think. "But taken together over time, the snippets coalesce into a surprisingly sophisticated protrait of your friends' inner lives, like dots forming into a pointillist painting." So, I got to wondering about how this idea of "ambient awareness" might apply to directors' technology knowledge. Obviously, directors need to know about technology at some level, because they need to oversee their CUs effectively. But they are not supposed to get granular; they're supposed to stay out of the operational weeds.
Stay tuned. I've got a writer looking into this for the October issue of CU Management magazine. Or, sign up for the CUES Director Advantage e-newsletter and you'll get the headline delivered to your email inbox when it's out.
Lisa Hochgraf is a CUES senior editor. Photocredit: Dollarphotoclub.com/Female photographer
