Derrick wrote in his blog a very interesting entry about about Rabble Addiction – about one of Rabble's users who confessed that he/she was addicted to Rabble to the point of neglecting job, friends, studies and other, even trading his/her RAZR for a mobile handset that won't support Rabble…
I find this very interesting indeed. And while Derrick disagrees with me on the root cause, attributing this to purely “addiction to connectivity” (yes the person is addicted to connectivity), this really is a consequence or manifestation of Information Overload… in this case Social Information Overload, where there is so much (social) information to attend to (friends, blogs, photos, sharing, and so on), overload caused by the "always connected phenomena" that mobility/always-on products are introducing into our lives, and that results in so much information to consume and people failing to attend even the very basic and important tasks in their lives.
I've previously written about The Connected Age = Information Overload, and how this connected age is the age of pushed-information and the age of information-overload, and that “While the management of information (overload) is a very interesting area of research, the right answer to information overload may not be based on technology at all, but on personal discipline — learn when to be connected and when not be so connected…”
I say it here… Social Information Overload (SIO)… a problem we must recognize and address, a problem that is here, now. Rabble's “addiction to connectivity” is proof of this problem. Our mobile products, which promotes “always connected” and “Social Information Overload”, must really take this phenomena into consideration, to help address (social) information overload, so that we can provide our end-users with a way that helps then manage and decide how and when to be connected or not. This is a hard and interesting human factors problem to address.
ceo