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Last Friday, I spoke at the University of Texas in Austin to a group of graduate students. The topic? New media, of course. As expected, there were some skeptics. They questioned the role of social media and whether it is just another passing fad. However, the majority of them were very excited about the promise of social media and it’s implications not only on the marketing mix but also on human behavior.

There were a lot of great questions, and some that got me thinking too. The one questions that really struck a chord with me was about information – and lot’s of it. His concern was “information overload,” as he put it, “what do it do with it all? How do I manage it?”

Then, this morning, this tweet from @bastholm:

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It appears this student isn’t the only one trying to figure out how to separate the signal from the noise. I explained that you don’t have to read or respond to everything, and that there are tools to help – Twitter Lists, TweetDeck, etc.

I think Lars (@bastholm) and Clay Shirky (@cshirky) are right. There is most definitely a filtering failure. But I also think that newbies suffer from FOMO (Fear of Missing Out). They are so excited about their recent discovery (e.g. Twitter) that they want to dive in head first. This is where they get overwhelmed. They discover that there’s an infinite stream of links and things to see and do. And they want to see and do them. This is definitely overload, and overwhelming.