Nov 09 2007
Social Media Burnout: "The Medium Is The Message"
Nat Torkington posted on a topic that I’m sure is going to get more and more attention in the coming year: the human limits of social media. There are many benefits for folks who know how to use blogs, wikis, social networks, Twitter (I’m still grappling with this one), etc. But it all comes at a price.
… the more we use these things, the more overwhelming the pressure to maintain the network feels. I had blog burnout eighteen months ago, with an enormous subscription list that was consuming all my time. I just went twelve months without using an RSS reader, I simply used delicious network, TechMeme, and Digg to get what my friends were reading, what the tech bloggers were saying, and what the masses were thinking. I wish I could say that I used the extra time to develop a brilliant piece of software, but actually I spent it detoxing from Silicon Valley by fishing. Regardless of how you would spend the extra time, though, most people feel like they need more time even though they have all these high-scaling low-transaction-cost methods of communication.
In a conversation with Giovanni Rodriguez he was telling me that this strange predicament might have been foretold by Marshall McLuhan, the so-called father of post-modern media theory and author of the phrases “the global village” and “the medium is the message.” McLuhan argued that all new technologies have the potential (1) to enhance, (2) to obsolesce, (3) to retrieve something that previously had been obsolesced, (4) and, if used to excess, to reverse the effect that was intended. In the context of social media, the danger to those who overuse the tools is that they will get the opposite of what they intend. Instead of efficiencies, they get inefficiency, inertia, burnout. A warning to people who are “always on”: you may soon turn off.
I’m more likely to turn off because of the lack of real thought that goes into blog posts. When the latest techmeme game is to obsequiously regurgitate TechCrunch then you know that quality is on the decline. And as we know - quality counts.
This has been a frustrating issue for me. I have several practices that I find helpful, the biggest is that nce a month, on the same Saturday that I clean off my desk, I review my feeds and cut out any that have a bunch of unread items. It shws that this blog doesn’t interest me enough. I do not allow myself to ever have more than 100 feeds and on that Saturday, I try to pae it down to 50. I read a lot more bloggers than that because other sources point me to good content. but when the RSS list gets too long, it becomes counter productive, in the same way that email does, when you allow to many unread items to accumulate.
Thanks Guys! Anyone else have any thoughts?