A couple of weeks ago I was explaining social media to a client. I was talking about microblogs – like Twitter and Tumblr – and about how millions of folks were posting and commenting on videos using their webcams. The client, an older, busy executive responded with an arched eyebrow and a dismissive, “I really don’t have time for that.”

I don’t think that’s true. To understand why, consider the San Francisco-based photographer Thomas Hawk. Hawk (a pen name) is an investment advisor and the CEO of Zooomr, a photo site. He’s also the father of two young girls. And, every day, every single day, he takes between 100 to 300 pictures and post-processes and uploads 30-50 of them to Zooomr and flickr. His goal is to publish a library of one million finished, processed pictures before he dies. So, here’s a busy executive and family man who manages to find time to take sometimes hundreds of pictures daily. He’s also an avid Twitterer. Hawk is doing what I call interstitial packratting.

Interstices are the spaces between. In comic strips the interstices are the white gaps between the static panels: the gap that separates the panicked glance in frame one from the tight shot of an exposed pistol in frame two, for example. As master comic educator Scott McCloud explains, the action happens in the viewer’s head in those interstices. That audience completion is what makes comics so compelling.

Social media works the same way; the action is in the spaces between. But back to Hawk. He shoots pictures waiting to cross a street, standing in a bank lineup, a movie cue, while walking from one appointment to another. He constantly carries a digital SLR and four lenses. He’s passionate about what he does and loves to share that passion and its photographic fruits. He’s packratting away the captured moments of his life in the free seconds and minutes the day serves him up. He’s an interstitial packrat.

So is anyone who Twitters. Twitterers dash off 140 character thoughts, ideas, challenges or questions in the time between a page request and a page download on a slow Internet connection. Between dialing tech support and getting someone online. Between this and that.

Author Clay Shirky looks at social media like Wikipedia and is in awe of what he calls the “cognitive surplus” that has been redirected from television or other passive media experiences and focused on creating Wikipedia entries.

I look at the hundreds of thoughtful, helpful and touching posts on Twitter the same way. It’s cognitive surplus on the micro level. And, maybe cognitive surplus is fractal, self-similar across a dwindling scale of time. Decide to write a wikipedia entry on fractals instead of watching Lost – decide to tell fellow Twitterers about an idea that just came into your head, instead of flipping a pen from one finger to the next. Same decision, same surplus, different scale.

So, does my client, who is not a CEO, have less time than Thomas Hawk? Unlikely. She just chooses to spend her interstices in other ways. She may be, for all I know, frittering them away, or doing a Sudoku or whatever she spends her spare cycles and seconds on. She doesn’t engage in social media for lack of time, she lacks interest, perhaps, or fails to see the true value, but, I would wager, a lack of time isn’t the key factor, its just the easiest excuse.

As most folks who have become fans of social media and microblogging will attest, used well, social media and interstitial packratting can save time. You get answers fast, keep up on breaking news, find out about trends and conference gossip, all in short bursts. That doesn’t mean social media can’t be distracting. It can be and lots of my Twitter pals routinely write posts like: “Twitterscope down kids, crunch time for me. Later.” But, some of the most productive people I know are also the most prolific Twitterers. They’ve found the value of the tool and have allowed it to fill the micro-gaps in their day usefully.

So, if someone in your organization blows off social media as devil’s work for idle hands point them to Thomas Hawk, or better still, ask them what they thought of the last episode of Lost, then raise your own eyebrow.

wayne

Wayne MacPhail

Wayne MacPhail has been a print and online journalist for 25 years. He was the managing editor of Hamilton Magazine and was a reporter and editor at The Hamilton Spectator until he founded Southam InfoLab,...