The other day I saw someone tweet this out, in a sort of semi-reaction to ChumpDump, effectively quoting the great Clay Shirky in saying..

I used to think about that alot, and I think depending on what your FOCUS is that statement could be correct.   But in terms of you, your brain and what all you can take as a human being, a filter can only do so much.  In fact in some ways a filter has nothing to do with it.  If you’re loading up your stream with more data than you can handle or care about, filtering that feed in the lame duck way of “hiding or muting” the unwanted noise.

Its like saying send me every possible piece of spam mail possible, I’ll let the filter figure it out- and then you willingly sign up for the spam.  The big solution there, is filter control?  That’s a big slice of denial if you ask me. Seriously if the best solution you can come up with is merely hiding from the feed you signed up for but dont care about or want to see any more, then why are you doing it?

Filtering the feed isn’t the solution.  Getting rid of the noise is the solution.  Weed those frickin chumps out baby, toss them aside, you got better thoughts to process than those that are slowing you down.

Make no mistake, information overload is here, its all around us.  In the past 5 minutes i’ve written this post some 400,000 tweets have flown on by, 90% of which mean nothing to me, 75% of which mean nothing to anyone else, yet, we feel compelled to stay connected, stay put, staring down the fire hose, even while we’re asleep.

There’s plenty of good tweets out there, some inspire us, some really connect with us, some help us validate our inner vibes and we all nod in unison, but alot of them, most of them, don’t really apply to our lives.  They fill up the spaces in our heads, telling us what they think is important, whats really in, out, around and everything else.  Turn off the feed and you go dark, silent, lost.  That’s really not a fix either.

The best fix, in our opinion is to get real with your feed.  Follow what matters and drop everything else.  Follow what inspires and ditch what does not. Follow what makes you laugh and drop whatever doesn’t.  Stay true to your karma, you know when the feed is bullshit, why live with it, why endure it, why must we endure what the networks tell us to endure?  Don’t we decide what influence is any more?  Are you really following 50,000 people online or are you just ignoring that whole outlet because you can’t realistically deal with the feed.  Chew on some of that fakery, get real, dump a chump, not just in our game but anywhere it doesn’t seem right.