Keeping Up With Social Networks

I hear ya. I have enough trouble keeping up with facebook, omninerd, a couple of blogs, LinkedIn, and three email accounts. Between the bunch of them, I often have trouble getting much actual work done; and I live a relatively cloistered life. I can’t imagine if I actually had a really active social life. I’d never get anything done. I had to stop participating in a few of these networks lately—including O-Nerd—just so I could complete a few projects.

Something that’s bothered me for a while is the way that so many of our close connections—people we grew up with, friends, family, etc. end up scattered to the four winds in pursuit of jobs, education, romance, etc.; and many more connections that we make are almost entirely electronic in nature, now.

It’s the price of a mobile society I guess; and there’s certainly some advantages, but I can’t help feeling like I’ve lost quite a lot in the transition, as well.

Maybe when virtual and augmented reality allow us to properly simulate being present in the same room as people without the time and expense of actually travelling there, things won’t seem so strained. But I think that kind of technology is many years off, yet.

I only use OmniNerd and FaceBook. As for chatting – gchat and FaceBook chat. That’s it! Yeah, I have a presence elsewhere, but I largely ignore them as there is nothing to do on those sites. I mean really, who cares about LinkedIn? I personally think Twitter is the most irritating thing and vomit a little on the inside each time somebody says “I Tweeted.” All my websites are aggregated through Google Reader so I don’t really even surf the net anymore. Just a couple of apps on the iPhone keep me in touch with what I care about and then a cursory glance at all the news stuff at night on an actual browser.

I sort of adopt the backpack philosophy I use at work. If the papers don’t fit in my bag, they get shredded. My entire office work fits in a single backpack. If it doesn’t, it either gets digitized to the laptop or discarded. Simple rule of importance and archiving that I adhere to. Likewise in the digital world, if it doesn’t work with one of the tools I use … well, I’ll reconsider it when it does and otherwise ignore that it exists.

Finally, a few months ago I joined Facebook. Before that, Omninerd was the only site I spent time on. There were a few other fly-by-night blog sites here and there, but I lost interest quickly. I have two teenagers who seem to use Facebook as their main means of communication, and so my wife and I decided to sign up just to see what it was all about.
It was great to find old college roommates and a few high-school friends that I lost track of long ago. I even got together with one of them recently as a direct result of this connection.
But after the initial novelty of finding the few people from the past who use the site, and catching up a little, I find that I’m signing on less and less as the weeks go on. My wife disabled her account after about a week. For the most part, the reason for this is the utter triviality of what is being posted here. I mean, who cares what some old college friend from 20 years ago had for dinner last night? What the heck is Mafia Wars? (I never took the time to find out because I knew I didn’t have time for whatever it was.) People seem to spend an awful lot of time on Facebook, but everything seems spread thin and light. There is nothing wrong with that, but it just doesn’t appeal to me. It may very well be that my age group (40’s) doesn’t contain enough people who use Facebook yet. Out of a high school class of roughly 200, I see maybe 12-15 people I’ve ever even heard of, and about the same for college, with was a much bigger group. I think that if it were available in my college days I would have used it much more and very differently than I do now.

I have to say that I don’t understand the appeal of Twitter at all, even after Oprah Winfrey joined.

These things can be a strange and abstract burden sometimes. I’m sure it’s just me, anyway. I have a Tracfone that runs out of service time way before it ever runs out of minutes.