I've been reading a book called The Golem and the Jinni. In the novel, the golem, Chava, can hear other people's thoughts. Sometimes the noise of all the chatter is so loud that she has to retreat to her small, quiet apartment to escape the dissonance.
The noise in our own lives can be equally as overwhelming. Consider this statistic I recently read about in the NTEN (Nonprofit Technology Enterprise Network) November newsletter. There are 48 hours of new video on YouTube, 684,000 pieces of content shared on Facebook, and 100,000 tweets - every minute of every day. Combine that with our own personal status updates, texts, notifications, emails, and tweets and we realize that our lives have turned into nothing short of a dull roar.
There is a concept in the social media business called content curation. It is the process of cutting through a huge amount of content and pulling together the most relevant, useful information for your audience. But, what if we became the content curators of our own lives in order to cut through the cacophony of unneeded communication coming our way every day?
In her article, The Non-Geek NonProfit Guide To Keeping Current On Technology, Cindy Leonard gives us some practical suggestions. Do you know you spend too much time on certain websites? If so, limit your access with tools like Leech Block, Clutter Cloak, OmmWriter, Freedom App, Stay Focused. Only subscribe to content after thorough evaluation and then use one of these applications to organize: Paperli, Hootsuite, Trapit, Flipboard. And, finally, unsubscribe, unfriend, and unfollow ruthlessly.
In Parshat Noah, Chapter 11, we witness our earliest ancestors as they build a tower to the heavens. These ziggurat's were considered sacred in Mesopotamian society, but they were thought to be a symbol of arrogance to the God of our Torah. As a punishment for building the tower, God "confound's their speech" and "scatters them over the face of the earth." Hence this tower to a false God, known as the Tower of Babel, caused God to create a chatter of unintelligible languages.
In our society, we have created a God of technology and, as a consequence, we have flooded our world with such a vast quantity of information and applications that deciphering it all is impossible. So, instead of buying into the constant buzz, may we resolve for 2014 to retreat from it so that we may learn to savor the sound of silence.
Shabbat Shalom.
The noise in our own lives can be equally as overwhelming. Consider this statistic I recently read about in the NTEN (Nonprofit Technology Enterprise Network) November newsletter. There are 48 hours of new video on YouTube, 684,000 pieces of content shared on Facebook, and 100,000 tweets - every minute of every day. Combine that with our own personal status updates, texts, notifications, emails, and tweets and we realize that our lives have turned into nothing short of a dull roar.
There is a concept in the social media business called content curation. It is the process of cutting through a huge amount of content and pulling together the most relevant, useful information for your audience. But, what if we became the content curators of our own lives in order to cut through the cacophony of unneeded communication coming our way every day?
In her article, The Non-Geek NonProfit Guide To Keeping Current On Technology, Cindy Leonard gives us some practical suggestions. Do you know you spend too much time on certain websites? If so, limit your access with tools like Leech Block, Clutter Cloak, OmmWriter, Freedom App, Stay Focused. Only subscribe to content after thorough evaluation and then use one of these applications to organize: Paperli, Hootsuite, Trapit, Flipboard. And, finally, unsubscribe, unfriend, and unfollow ruthlessly.
In Parshat Noah, Chapter 11, we witness our earliest ancestors as they build a tower to the heavens. These ziggurat's were considered sacred in Mesopotamian society, but they were thought to be a symbol of arrogance to the God of our Torah. As a punishment for building the tower, God "confound's their speech" and "scatters them over the face of the earth." Hence this tower to a false God, known as the Tower of Babel, caused God to create a chatter of unintelligible languages.
In our society, we have created a God of technology and, as a consequence, we have flooded our world with such a vast quantity of information and applications that deciphering it all is impossible. So, instead of buying into the constant buzz, may we resolve for 2014 to retreat from it so that we may learn to savor the sound of silence.
Shabbat Shalom.
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