I do enjoy twitter, and often find myself perusing the past posts at twitku, my twitter/jaiku posting tool of choice. Recently there was a bunch of activity regarding twitterfox, formerly called twitter notifier. It allows you to embed a twitter notifying popup in your firefox browser so you are immediately notified when someone updates (of course you can select how often, and you can decide to turn off the popup).

Personally, I keep a twitku tab open and check in when I want to. Which means, I am not interrupted. This works well for my productivity when I am sitting in foreign countries with slow internet connections. Sheesh.

Anyhoo, I am worried about your cognitive health. You see, each time the twitterfox notifier pops up alerting you that a new tweet has occurred you are distracted, not just inconveniently but also cognitively.

This type of interruption violates the split attention theory, which branches from the cognitive load theory. If I were involved in learning something (which is hopefully the vast majority of time I am sitting here), then I would have my cognitive train derailed more often than is necessary, negatively affecting my learning.

For me, that’s not ok. I need twitku to be on demand, hence the tab scenario.

Take this screenshot (did I tell you how much I love skitch?)…click for full size version.

It comes from the wikipedia article on Cognitive Load Theory.

If I am involved in reading this article, my working memory is going to be heavily processing information that will hopefully make it into long term memory. This process is halted by the interruption of twitterfox.

Twitter and Jaiku are useful tools for me, but I cannot afford to be interrupted, not because I am terribly important or busy, but rather because my working memory suffers and that derails learning. Twitter and Jaiku are useful tools at times, and at times pointless fun, but they have to be leveraged properly.

NB: I am not a cognitive scientist, and this is subject to my understanding of cognitive load theory. Please understand this is my take and is based on how I learn, I am not ragging on you at all. If you disagree, that’s fine. Just be nice about it!