Tim Hughes excellent blog (The Boot) had an interesting take on Twitter et al. This for me raises the issue of how well we are humans are coping with the value of Social Networking.
I think that we are all suffering from the effect of too much noise. I often wonder if we are actually communicating too much. I believe we spend more time talking that we did say 15 years ago before cell phones became ubiquitous. So email made us write more. Actually the "one to many" capabilities of today's communication tools makes us READ more than we had to - and not necessarily quality reading matter as witnessed by the fall off in readership of newspapers.
I still have the fundamental problem in that from my perspective everyone’s comments regarding Social Media are focused on either the macro/global scale value or an individual binary interaction possibility (I could explain that but I think you get the idea).
On the Global scale everyone seems to be excited about Twitter as a way of generating noise. And that is the fundamental problem . There is TOO MUCH GLOBAL NOISE. I have been tracking my emails and FB comments and frankly I was drowning before in email alone – now I am just underwater permanently. So I am busy canceling email subscriptions and Tweets that I used to follow as being of little or no value to my life long term or worse I have to edit out the things that I used to like in favor of keeping up with things that must be followed (You WILL obey!)
I have turned off so many things that frankly I used to enjoy because now I have to be careful about the physical amount of time taken to read and absorb things. So my concern is multiple.
Allow me to share my thoughts on the fundamental issues that these services and Social Networking tools generate and then see if you are in agreement
1. There is no quality measurement tool. I have no way of knowing whether the info reaching me from someone I follow is germane, in context or just plain old drivel.
2. Any reasonable level of responsibility in people's comments is sorely lacking.
3. The battle for mind share by Twitter, Facebook, Google et al (including Linked-in etc etc) is turning us into victims - innocent wounded non-combatants. I really didn't sign up with Facebook to be spammed, but I am and I am sure that most other people are too. The sheer amount of unnecessary stuff one has to filter out before you reach the nuggets is somewhat challenging.
4. The process of unsubscribing and turning things off is pretty hard and not always effective. The digital footprints that these social networks leave behind with out of date information is scary.
5. The inconsistent time lag between a change one might make and the update reaching all the parts connected is both scary and to some extent dangerous.
6. The lack of ability to fix something that could be wrong...
7. Social Creep! I want to have just the information and relationships that I originally asked for - not all this other creep based noise that arrives in as extraneous digital junk that I have to sweep away.
8. Why is the onus on me to manage it and deal with the junk?
So I can see why some of the people I know are becoming Luddites. I can identify 4 sub types:
Some are the "I don't care any more so I just wont play the game" type (aka the Browned Off Luddite)
Some are the "I hate you and will deliberately work against the system and create havoc destroying the premise and the assumptions of the service (aka the Terrorist Luddite)
Some are the "Help there is nothing I can do" type (aka the Deer Luddite)
And finally there is the "We're not going to take it any more" (aka the Tommy Luddite)
The way I see the problem is its the syndrome of "because it's there". However does just because you can mean that you must either push the digital crap or you must pull it?
If you got this far then clearly I have made an impression on you. But if not then I am just contributing to the noise myself!
OK so now where are my earplugs...........
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