One of the out of session discussions at the Georgia Baha’i School yesterday morning was on how bad online media are for us. (I’ve boiled down what was described to neurotransmitters.)
- Dopamine: Anticipation with each click will lead to a reward leads to addiction-like behaviors.
- Oxytocin: Lack of touch leads to feeling lonely.
For those of us seeking to feel connected, online media provides a false sense of connectedness. We feel more connected, but this is an illusion. We need the oxytocin for a true connectedness which we don’t get enough through online media. The best use of online social media is to discover the connections necessary for quality face-to-face time with people so we can get what we need. I’d say most of my current face-to-face arose from being active online.
The problem is when our interactions devolve to only being through this. Lately I’ve been thinking I consume too much media which distracts me from trying to be around people. With 592 people on my Facebook friends list, I’m probably reading too many Facebook status updates, apps, etc. Between my RSS readers (yeah, plural), I have 277 subscriptions with at the moment around 1,600 items marked for me to read. With 76 TiVo subscriptions, I’m probably watching too much television. I feel so constantly behind with these technologies I feel like I need to work through them which means I’m spending less time with people.
This isn’t really new for me. My bad habit is to invest myself too much in media by not culling enough of the subscriptions. I’m also hesitant to assert myself in other people’s lives. Some call it reticent: “reluctant to draw attention to yourself”. I’m the person who is likely found hanging around the periphery of a party. This recipe for disaster is why my resolutions usually have something about participating more in social activities. Without such goals, my only social interactions would be through work.



The Twitter Timesink
May 6, 2009 in Social / IM / Chat by Ezra S F | No comments
Glenn asked: “What is it about Twitter that makes it more of a time sink than Facebook?”
I consider a time sink something where I invest a high value of time for boring and poor value.
My contacts mostly duplicate in Twitter what they provide in Facebook. The time I spend reading Twitter posts I’ve already read in Facebook is a waste of my time. My Twitter contacts respond about a 1/5th as much as Facebook users (it used to be higher in Twitter). So I get more out of Facebook.
Twitter Replies suck. The Replies system makes it look like my contacts reply much more to me than others which I find highly unlikely. More likely the Replies implementation stifles conversation by requiring either everyone to be public or to allow all the participants to follow each other for there to be one conversation. Instead its many different (sometimes hidden) duplicate conversations. Facebook comments are attached to the status update so following a conversation is significantly easier.
Twitter Apps suck. Last Friday, I looked at Facebook Connect for AIR. My complaint about it was my interactions with Facebook would be as limited as Twitter. The promise of Twitter apps is to do more than the Twitter.com web UI provides. Many just provide easier ways to do the same thing: see your Twitter timeline. Others let you see quantification of your usage. Facebook apps by contrast provide access to content not within Facebook, so more of the web because part of my Facebook access so I can actually do more.
Except Socialthing and Tweetdeck. They are exemplary implementations of Twitter Apps. They extend the functionality of just Twitter by itself and are primary reasons I kept at it for so long. Socialthing unofficially died a while ago and official stoppage of support was announced last week while I wasn’t using it. Tweetdeck probably will stick around for a while.
Twitter lacks granular privacy. In Twitter, either you are private or public or ban specific users. I’m torn between public and not. So I opted for private with sneezypb where I mostly subscribe to friends. My other account, ezrasf, was where I subscribed to Blackboard community members, educational technologists, etc. Facebook could improve some in privacy as well. Compared to Twitter, Facebook makes a great attempt at granular privacy. Plurk, another microblogging / status update site, represents the privacy Holy Grail for me. It allows for making specific posts public, private, available to groups, or individuals.
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