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.
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