The Five Most Endangered Words on the Internet [Comment]

The five most endangered words of the realtime internet era are:

Let me take into consideration that.

Shirley Sherrod, the former rural development director for the Agriculture Department in Georgia found that out the hard way when she was fired by the Obama administration for her delivery of a supposedly racist speech. The speech was creatively excerpted, political bloggers and cable news commentators blew up the story, it entered the Twitterverse, and boom, Sherrod was asked to resign from her position.

Unfortunately, nobody looked as if it would have time to take heed to the full speech. When they did, Sherrod was showered with apologies and found herself taking calls from the President.

This story is less about politics and more about pace. It provides a clear example of the way our Facebook and Twitter behaviors are bleeding over into anything else of our lives. White House spokesman Robert Gibbs summed up the location:

Members of this administration, members of the media, members of other political factions on each side of this have all made determinations and judgment without a whole set of facts.

That\’s an apt description of the hot national pastime: Baseball, hot dogs, apple pie and making determinations and judgments without an entire set of facts.

When confronted with the realtime web\’s constant flow of incoming information, who has time for a whole set of facts? We each take a couple of seconds to contemplate a one hundred forty character blurb and then hammer out our reactions by the use of a Tweet or status update.

That model works for some incoming data. I only want a few seconds to return up with my official response to much of what is shared through the realtime web: Farmville update (hide), Foursquare Check-in (ignore), Mel Gibson tape (email link to Rabbi), Kid in a watermelon (retweet).

Other news and data doesn\’t necessarily fit into the hot instant-response model. But as everything merges into a single stream, it\’s getting more challenging to turn off the reflex and the sense of urgency long enough to identify the information that requires a little bit more consideration.

You want me to hearken to a complete speech given by the the rural development director for the Agriculture Department in Georgia? Come on. I actually have hundreds of incoming bits to either regurgitate or about which I have to render my rock solid opinion. You believe it\’s easy to become knowledgeable pundit on topics as varied as phone antennas, oil spills, Lindsay Lohan\’s jail experience, World Cup soccer and the interior workings of Mel Gibson\’s phone etiquette in a single sitting?

Are you ever surprised by how certain you’ll be about your position on a subject that you just only heard about 30 seconds before?

Where does this lead? Will we rebound from this trend and begin to compartmentalize that incoming information which requires deeper thought or does everything get put on the high speed and never ending instant-opinion assembly line?

I\’ll answer that query with the three most endangered words within the blogosphere.

I don\’t know.

Dave Pell is an online addict, early adopter and insider. He blogs regularly at Tweetage Wasteland.

Illustration: Nikki Cook

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This post is tagged: Endangered, Internet, words, [Comment]