The Social Media Parable of the Orange Marble

I facil­i­tated a recent lunch and learn on social media for a small group of about 20 peo­ple. Most of the group felt over­whelmed by all the infor­ma­tion avail­able, so I came up with a sim­ple lit­tle anal­ogy. Then over the week­end, I bor­rowed a few props from my chil­dren. Think of this video as a Yuvi Zalkow knock­off for those that can’t afford the real thing.

Tran­script:

Imag­ine infor­ma­tion as a giant set of mar­bles. Bil­lions and bil­lions of mar­bles. And every sin­gle mar­ble is unique — dif­fer­ent col­ors, dif­fer­ent designs, dif­fer­ent sizes, dif­fer­ent tex­tures. The way we used to access these mar­bles of infor­ma­tion and the way we can access them today has changed — dramatically.

These mar­bles used to live in a remote moun­tain lake. Calm and serene. A col­or­ful majes­tic mas­ter­piece. But there were two major prob­lems with this infor­ma­tion set up: vis­i­bil­ity and access. Not all the infor­ma­tion was vis­i­ble, in fact most of it was hid­den below the sur­face. And while learn­ing was tech­ni­cally open to any­one, it was dif­fi­cult to access. You either had to hike up to the lake with your can­teen and fill it up, or some­one else hiked up there and brought infor­ma­tion back down to you. Learn­ing required a sig­nif­i­cant amount of work. Some­one had to hike up the moun­tain. Plus if what you wanted to learn what was on the other shore or in the mid­dle of the lake, it required even greater effort.

Today, the dam on lake has bro­ken open and infor­ma­tion is on the move. Pic­ture Nigahiga Falls with mar­bles. Mil­lions of gal­lons of infor­ma­tion flow­ing over the falls every sec­ond. While we can now see what was once hid­den below the sur­face, the flow of infor­ma­tion is too fast and pow­er­ful. If you tried drink­ing from that big of a water­fall, you’d likely drowned.

For­tu­nately, there are sev­eral tips and tools that give us the power to con­trol the flow of infor­ma­tion for our spe­cific, indi­vid­ual needs.I can say, give me only orange mar­bles. Look at those and say, not focused enough, give me only plain orange mar­bles that are 9/16 in diam­e­ter. That’s much more manageable.

Social media at its sim­plest from is about con­sum­ing and shar­ing infor­ma­tion. The trick is sim­ply to learn to fil­ter to your spe­cific inter­ests and pace.