Oprah.

At a wedding on the weekend I overheard a conversation at the next table, where people were discussing Oprah's activities in Sydney and one girl interjected and asked whether Oprah was in the country? I looked over and she was serious and it got me wondering how it was possible the girl didn't know about the world's greatest sales woman being in Australia?

There hasn't been a media channel, no matter how trivial, that hasn't picked up on the Oprah cavalcade of stars and audience members in Australia, from watching koalas mate to climbing the bridge. Interestingly no one asked the girl but I suspect she was not interested in the daily minutiae of life, especially when it concerned the comings and goings of global celebrities. Who doesn't want to know about Oprah?

Hard to imagine not watching the news or picking up a paper, let alone surfing the web or tweeting you just saw Oprah at the corner store because we have been inundated with so many Oprah sightings that Elvis comes to mind. Oprah, still in the global top 10 of twitterers with over 4.5 million followers isn't too worried that the wedding girl didn't know about her but I was still fascinated.

The Wedding girl didn't look like a cliched hippy drop out not interested in society or its news cycle, the pearls and little black dress weren't exactly Nimbin wear, so it has to be a conscious effort to avoid either the news or gossip and sound bites. Either way it's an impressive effort on her part and I don't know if I'm not a little jealous because the detritous of the day's information cycle certainly gets in the way of real stuff like peace in the middle east and what the banks are charging for their latest fees.

So can you really avoid the media storm of information or is there special training we could take so as to listen and interact with only the most important facts, aimed at us as individuals? A colleague of mine recently had his hearing tested because he thought he was going deaf while listening to his girlfriend but not hearing everything. It turns out his hearing was perfect and his doctor suggested he just pay more attention when his girl was talking.

Maybe that was the wedding girl and she really only paid attention when it concerned her and her interests. That kind of attention span again, is impressive if you can harness it and make it work for you. At this moment in time we are probably at a global peak of media disruptions and interruptions causing us to look in every direction for what interests us the most. So if you could harness all your energy and concentration, imagine how much you could get done?

Did you hear Oprah's was just sighted on the harbour?

Now what was I just doing?