I have teenage daughters. At least, I assume they're still my daughters. They hang around our house and eat our food. But, to be honest, it's been a while since we identified ourselves to each other. Between Angry Birds, SMS and Facebook, there's precious little actual conversing going on in the Hotchkiss household. I barely recognize their faces, lit up as they are by the cool blue digital light of an iPhone screen. I assume that, at times, there's a living being at the other end of their multi-texting, but I'm not really sure.
Yesterday, I overheard this in our lunch room: "I went for dinner the other night but have no idea how it was. Between tweeting my location, updating my status and posting a review to Yelp, I never actually ate anything."
I'm guessing this comment was made in jest, but you never know. I remember one after-conference party held under the bridge in Sydney's magnificent harbor, watching one very well-known search guru tweet his way through the entire evening. I don't think he even noticed the Opera House on the other side of the bay. He was so busy tweeting his experience; he overlooked the actual "experiencing" part.
It seems to me that the more we engage in social media, the less social we actually become. The world in front of our noses is increasing being obstructed by one type of screen or another. The more we live in our new digital communities, the less we live in our real-life, flesh and blood ones. I can't remember my neighbor's name, but I can track the minute-by-minute location of people I've never met and probably never will. And by the way, congats on becoming Mayor of the Beans n' Buns coffee shop on the corner of "LOL" and "OMG" in a city I'll never set foot in. I'm not sure why that's important to me, but all the "in" people assure me it is.
Humans were built to be social, but I'm not sure we were designed for social media. For one thing, research has proven that multitasking is a myth. We can't do it. Our kids can't do it. Nobody can do it. Much as we think we're keeping all our digital balls in the air, eyes darting back and forth from screen to screen, it's all a self-perpetuated ruse. Attention was designed to work with a single focus. You can switch it from target to target, but you can't split it. If you try, you'll just end up doing everything poorly.
Secondly, we're built to communicate with the person in front of our nose. We pick up the vast majority of a conversation through body language and visual cues. Try as technology might, there's just no way a virtual experience can match the bandwidth or depth of engagement you'll find in a real face-to-face conversation. Yet, we continually pass up the opportunity to have these, opting instead to stare at a little screen and text our thumbs off.
As we spend more time with our digital connections, it's inevitable that we'll have less satisfying engagements with the people who share our physical space and time. The disturbing part about that is we may not realize the price we're paying until it's too late. Social media has slyly incorporated many elements from online gaming to make using it treacherously addictive. I suspect if we wired up the average teen while she was using Facebook or Foursquare, we'd find a hyperactive pleasure center, bathing her brain in dopamine. We're forgoing the real pleasures of bonding to pursue an artificially wired short-cut.
The ironic part of all this is that I wrote this column on a four-hour flight, spending most of it staring at some kind of screen or another. The person sitting next to me on the plane? I don't think we spoke more than four words to each other.
COMMENTARY: I have to agree with Gord Hotchkiss' comments about the irony of social media and how our daily lives have become one email, tweet or wall post, instead of real person-to-person communications.
According to memory experts, the maximum number of friends one can track and remember is about 300. Once you go over that number, you start to get "brain fog". It's ridiculous just how many friends or followers one can have on Facebook and Twitter. It has become a status symbol to have a lot of friends. There have been races to see who can get the most friends or followers. Unfortunately, they are not really friends, but strangers, and keeping track and trying to remember them all is futile. Just this morning I went over 1,000 friends on Twitter for the first time. I have tried to be selective, controlling the number of friends, and it has taken me a while to attain that number. I purge followers I no longer wish to follow, and I went one week connecting with only about a dozen people out of 100 individuals who wanted to follow me.
The real problem are the so-called social media "bots" which match you with other individuals based on common interests, likes and dislikes. However, there is a flaw with these bots. The mere mention of a key word, subject or hashtag can end up matching you with the wrong people. Case in point: After Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords was shot, I was very vocal about the Tea Party and how far they have carried the right to bear arms to an extreme. Next thing I know the bots started recommending that I matchup with ultra-conservatives and Tea Party members and groups. I am sure that many of these individuals are nice people, but I just don't care for their brand of politics. This is a perfect example where social media technology has failed us.
Mr. Hoshkiss is 100% right when he says it has become impossible to really multi-task. You spend more time trying to determine if you want them to be a friend or follow you. It's a real time killer and takes away from some of the important activities that I really enjoy doing. In short, social media has become a pariah, making it more difficult to establish serious and intimate one-to-one relationships with those individuals that really matter to us.
When social media affects quality time with your own family and close friends, and you feel tied up in knots, then you know you have reached social media overload. Although I cannot prove it, social media overload could eventually lead to social media fatigue, and then we start tuning out, instead of tuning in. On August 30, 2010, TechCrunch wrote an excellent piece about social media fatigue, which I recommend all of us read.
Courtesy of an article dated February 24, 2011 appearing in MediaPost Publications Search Insider
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