His parents (as are all of our parents) are from a different time period. Not only that, they are from a different era in another country - China. I offered to him the fact that a lot of times parents sort of have these classic nuggets of wisdom that can be gleaned - so they can be right, even when their suggestions are "wrong for me," specifically.
His argument, however, was that for him, the signal-to-noise ratio of the conversations he has with his parents make it not worth the cost of trying to glean that out. Unfortunate, but an interesting way of thinking about it.
It got me thinking about other sources of signal-and-noise. Google Reader. Classes. Books. Television. What mediums (media?) are worth it? This ties into the whole information-overload argument - it used to be that he with the most information won; now he who filters the information best and has the most relevant information wins. But what if getting that relevant information is not cost-effective?
Google Trends reports that of my 843 subscriptions (how did it get back that high?), in the last 30 days I've read 1,348 items. That's 45 items per day, out of what varies from 2000 and 5000 items posted per day, for a 0.9% to 2.25% read-through rate. I'm no digital signal expert, but I'm guessing a 50-to-1 or 100-to-1 noise-to-signal ratio is not a very good place to be. Time to declutter perhaps...
Just a random babble...
0 comments:
Post a Comment