I had an interesting conversation with Dave Carter yesterday that got me thinking (scary, I know). Dave was telling me how he’s getting kind of frustrated with the volume of tweets from some of the “Twitterati” who share the seemingly “mundane” details of their lives, like waiting in line at Starbucks, getting their car cleaned, etc. I have been hearing this complaint a lot lately and I’m not sure why.

No question, it can’t be denied that there is a ton of noise on Twitter and it can be difficult to navigate. I like some of the noise and some of it I don’t. While agree with the point about the amount of noise, I personally don’t find it annoying because I am in control of what I pay attention to. I can choose who and what I listen to and selectively tune out things I don’t care about.

In some ways I look at it like the radio. For example, I am a huge fan of Howard Stern. I listen to him every morning on the commute to the office and every night on my way home. In fact, I don’t think I have changed the station from Howard 100 in the last 6 months. That said, I don’t agree with or like everything Howard has to say. Some of the segments about his personal life (walking his dog, going to his parents house on one the weekends, etc) I find really boring. Some guests are just terrible and some topics are just beat to death by his crew. By and large I love what he talks about but there are always things I can do without. In the case of Howard, I am willing to live with the things I don’t like because the majority of his content is great. When things get boring, I have the option of changing the station. If the majority of his content ever became unbearable for me, I also have the option of never tuning in again. Point is, like on twitter, I always have the option of selectively ignoring what I’m not interested in.

On twitter you don’t have to like everything, or listen to everything, the people you are following have to say. You can follow individuals and use tools like TweetDeck to select what you read and what you want to pay attention to. If you find yourself uninterested in a majority of some one’s content you always have the ability to “change the channel” or “unfollow” them. The control you have over what you listen to is one of the reasons I am a fan of Twitter, and social media in general.

The long and short of it is, it’s easy to listen to the content or individuals you find interesting and selectively ignore the rest.

photo credit: niznoz

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