Just how many networks do we have to check on a daily basis? Facebook. LinkedIn. Google+. Instagram. Twitter. Quora. Pinterest. Wordpress. And probably several other groups that we are a part of. In my case, the list is so much longer as I’m trying out several new apps at any given time. For instance, at the moment – Fab, Etsy, Voto, Photopoll, Fashiolista, StumbleUpon, Seesaw, Polar, etc. This is, of course, only a sample.
At the end of the day, I’m exhausted just thinking about all the networks I haven’t yet caught up with. By the time I wake up in the morning, there will be fresh news to catch up on and I won’t know what I missed. I’m afraid of missing that critical piece of information – a baby that everyone except me knew my friend was having or Yahoo!’s next acquisition that slipped by in the few hours that I was away from technology news!
The exhaustion is not only about the content ready to be consumed. But, it is also about the content you produce. How do you socialize your own content? Do you put it on all the networks? Only a subset of them? If so, how do you decide which one should be publicize where? There are so many sites providing advice on “N number of ways to publicize your blog” or “getting noticed”… Great, now that I spent all that time writing the content and coming up to speed on my social media content for the day, it is time to comment on blogs, browse and follow random blogs, add it to bookmarking sites, send out links on various networks, etc.!
I have not even talked about some types of content that we may like to consume that steal some of our attention as well. It is simply exhausting to be subject to this explosion of social media and there is no sign of a slowdown.
I uninstalled Facebook the other day from my phone and went without it for over a week – turns out I didn’t miss it all that much! I caught up with it when I actually had the time on a laptop. The main reason I brought it back on my phone was because of the hundreds of other apps that I’ve authorized to use my Facebook credentials – without it, I had to manually log into each one of those apps and that was extremely painful.
Are you equally exhausted by socia media? I’d like to understand how people deal with this and filter out various types of information on a daily basis. To me, this is pretty daunting. A challenge that is only going to compound in the coming years.
Social media has transformed us into fidgety people that often have a separation anxiety without access to a connected device. I find myself turning my phone on to look at notifications far more often than I should and I suspect I’m not the only one. As you can tell from the picture here, I don’t actually read any of my emails from the various social networks. Just looking at the big picture is exhausting enough!
Obviously, this is not a sustainable trend. The answer is in relevance filtering and summarization. But, I’m not really sure that we can build these technologies as quickly as the information is growing. For a while, I believe we will struggle to deal with excessive social media impact before we figure out a sustainable path!
TechBits by Vidya Narayanan 