photo credit: eddy joaquim

Almost two years ago, I can’t believe it’s been that long, I reached a trou­bling point in my life of infor­ma­tion over­load. I decided at that time to take a social media sab­bat­i­cal. It was one of those things where I was care­ful look at my issues, and not lay blame on some­thing or some­one. I felt that tak­ing some time off from social media would help me focus and hone in on what dri­ves my rather com­pul­sive online, social media engage­ment. After three months, I made a return to social media. At the time, I felt like I had gained some per­spec­tive, and would be much bet­ter about lim­it­ing the time and energy put into ser­vices like Face­book, Twit­ter, and Google Buzz (now Google+). I don’t know if I would go so far as to say that I had con­curred my demons, so to speak, but I had the inten­tion of being more aware of time spent on social media, and even attempt­ing to set up more struc­tured pat­terns for my activity.

Fast for­ward to June 2012, and I feel that I am tee­ter­ing between the same space I found myself in 2010 and a place that’s a bit fur­ther down into the rab­bit hole. Like before, it’s not really as easy as say­ing that I woke up one morn­ing with a glow­ing light bulb over my head. No. The impulse or desire to jet­ti­son social media from my every­day life has been build­ing for a while. The dri­vers have been varied.

Per­haps I saw this com­ing. When I made my return to social media, I wrote the following:

I reached a burn out point with social media, and though I’m return­ing, it’s def­i­nitely with a cau­tious approach. I may, in the end, decide that the return only con­firmed that my time off was the right thing to do, and I’ll just shut the whole thing down and return to call­ing and email­ing my friends.

Here is my take on the social net­works that con­sume way too much of my time and atten­tion span.

Face­book
Face­book has prob­a­bly become the cen­ter of love/hate rela­tion­ship with social media. I can’t, and don’t, blame Face­book for my com­pul­sive check-in issue. That’s my stuff and I have to own it. What I’ve come to hate, though, is Facebook’s grow­ing watch­ful eye and per­va­sive fin­ger­print on, seem­ingly, every­thing that I do online. Nearly every site, includ­ing this blog, has Face­book tie-ins. That’s fine, but what has really started to sour me on Face­book is the need to have a Face­book account to func­tion online. There are a num­ber of sites that require you to have a Face­book account to com­ment on arti­cle. The real kicker was Spo­tify requir­ing a Face­book account to join. The com­pany says that it’s all about being social with music. I can see the ben­e­fit of want­ing to share music I like with oth­ers, but Face­book should be an add-on, not a require­ment. The only way I could see hav­ing a Face­book account to join a site is if Face­book owned the ser­vice — such as Insta­gram. I love that I am able to keep up with fam­ily and friends on Face­book, but I’ve reached a point where the ben­e­fit is start­ing to be over­taken by the neg­a­tives of the site itself.

Twit­ter
I made a con­scious effort to remove peo­ple that I kept up with on Face­book, namely because their posts were redun­dant. I have always viewed Twit­ter more as a news ticker, and less of a means to keep tabs on friends and fam­ily. The issue with news tick­ers is that, unless it repeats, you miss stuff when you’re away. Of course, I can always use the search fea­ture in Twit­ter to find spe­cific peo­ple and their posts. Like­wise, I can cre­ate spe­cific tabs within Hoot­Suite to fol­low indi­vid­u­als or par­tic­u­lar top­ics. At some point, Twit­ter because an inter­est­ing place to pop in, see what’s hap­pen­ing, click a few links, and pop out. The prob­lem, how­ever, became that I was not prac­tic­ing the last part. I didn’t pop out. I’d keep Twit­ter open in a tab all the time, and click into it more and more.

Google+
Google Buzz was an inter­est­ing ser­vice, but it was a bit too one-off for most peo­ple. Google never really seemed to know what it wanted Google Buzz to be. A lot of early adopters jumped on board, but even we openly com­plained. It appears that Google took note, and used some of the ele­ments of Buzz to develop Google+. In my eyes, Google is build­ing some­thing really com­pelling in the social media space. Google+ allows you, with ease, to share things with one per­son, a select group or groups (known as Cir­cles), or pub­licly. Noti­fi­ca­tions are really well done, and you can mute posts if you’re tired of get­ting updates. The treat­ment of pho­tos on Google+ is far bet­ter than on any other social plat­form. The Hang­out fea­ture is a great way to video chat with one or up to 10 peo­ple at the same time. Finally, for the gram­mar nerd in me, one of the best fea­tures of Google+ is the abil­ity to edit your posts and com­ments at any time.

Google+ actu­ally is the one place where I am going to make a caveat to my with­drawal from social media. I have been work­ing to get all of my cousins, spread out through­out coun­try, on Google+ so that we can do Hang­outs and share sto­ries and pho­tos. We could prob­a­bly do all of this Skype and our own web­site, but I don’t know if it’s worth it to rein­vent the wheel. I may just “Uncir­cle” every­one except my fam­ily. Any­thing that I share will just be with fam­ily. So, in essence, we will use Google+ as our intra-family social media net­work. Maybe some may view this as a cheat or a fudge of my social media opt-out; but I’m will­ing to live with this exception.

Other Net­works
There are other net­works that have, inter­mit­tently, cap­tured my atten­tion. One net­work in par­tic­u­lar, though, has become a burr in my saddle.

LinkedIn

Some peo­ple my debate whether LinkedIn is a social net­work, because it brands itself as a pro­fes­sional net­work­ing site. That’s find and I get the qual­i­fier, but in my mind it’s still a social net­work. I am not short-sighted about pro­fes­sional net­work­ing, even if I am not look­ing for a job; but I just don’t see, and have not seen, any tan­gi­ble ben­e­fit for my pres­ence on LinkedIn. The major­ity of peo­ple that want to con­nect with me are look­ing for an angle or con­nec­tion into where I work — a fed­eral reg­u­la­tory agency. Most of the con­nec­tion requests are trans­par­ent, and offer no sub­stan­tive value.

Going For­ward

Start­ing some­time between now and July 1st, I will be delet­ing my pro­files on Face­book, Twit­ter, Google+, LinkedIn, Tum­blr, Flikr, Last.fm, Spo­tify, and any other sites that I have failed to men­tion. Now, fully expect a num­ber of peo­ple, react­ing to my with­drawal from social media, to say some­thing like this,

Why do you have to leave social media? Why don’t you just check in less?

My knee-jerk reac­tion is, “It’s my deci­sion. I’m not judg­ing you for stay­ing, so don’t judge me for leav­ing.” The more mea­sured and thought­ful response is that — and I, in no way, want to triv­i­al­ize what alco­holics or drug addicts go through — I feel like I have to treat social media like an addic­tion. Try­ing to reduce my intake is not work­ing. I have to step away com­pletely. Chalk it up to my per­son­al­ity or the way my brain is wired, but I just don’t feel good. I am tired of con­stantly check­ing in, and then feel­ing guilty about all the time spent engaged in that activ­ity. In the end, there’s a dif­fer­ence between going online and liv­ing online. I’ve spent way too much time doing the lat­ter, and social media is the pri­mary rea­son. I’m tired, and I need to pull off of the road.

Beyond the the gen­eral push-and-pull pangs of guilt over my time spent on social media, I feel like I have mas­tered the art of hav­ing knowl­edge of things that is a mile wide and an inch deep. I don’t spend any time get­ting to know more than the sur­face of any par­tic­u­lar thing. My knowl­edge is cur­sory. To be hon­est, I like feel­ing knowl­edge­able and being able to engage in a con­ver­sa­tion about many things. The prob­lem, how­ever, is that once I get past the sur­face knowl­edge, I resort to intel­li­gent spec­u­la­tion. While I’d like to think that I am quite adept at tying things, even dis­parate things, together; there’s a nag­ging lack of sat­is­fac­tion know­ing that I am only scratch­ing the sur­face of issues discussed.

To that end, want to focus more of my time read­ing. I feel as if I need to actu­ally train my brain and body to sit still and read. Be it books, long-form works or short arti­cles, I am out of prac­tice of keep­ing my eyes glued to some­thing longer than minute at a time. Carla and I were out walk­ing on Sat­ur­day, and we passed the neigh­bor­hood DC Pub­lic Library near our house. I men­tioned to her that in all my years in the neigh­bor­hood I had never stepped foot inside that build­ing. No sooner did I speak those words than I decided that I am going to go in and get a library card. Talk about a throw-back con­cept. I also sub­scribed to the daily print ver­sion of The Wash­ing­ton Post and Sun­day New York Times. I was encour­aged that every­one in the house seems to be enjoy­ing the paper. It makes me smile to walk down­stairs and see Noah sit­ting on the couch read­ing the paper.

An edi­tor for one of my favorite tech web­sites, The Verge, is tak­ing a year off of the Inter­net. You can read his post about leav­ing the Inter­net here. I must admit that I first saw Paul’s move a tad self-indulgent. How­ever, I have grown to admire what he’s doing, par­tic­u­larly as I have started to think about the grow­ing sense of being over­whelemed. I read Paul’s arti­cles about life with­out Inter­net with some inter­est (click here to find his install­ments), the prospect of opt­ing out of the Inter­net is just a non-starter. Not because I don’t think that I could sur­vive, but sim­ply because my job requires access to the Inter­net. The same can be sound about the back­ground stuff that I do for Carla’s busi­ness (web­sites, Google Apps & e-commerce). Addi­tion­ally, I rely on the Inter­net for stream­ing video con­tent, and with­out cable, I’m not will­ing to give that up.

I will con­tinue to write on this blog — hope­fully more. There may be some peo­ple who will ask, or want to know, why I have the two rows of shar­ing but­tons below each post. My answer is sim­ple. I am leav­ing social media, not you. If you see some­thing you like doesn’t mean you are. Share away.

In the next cou­ple of days I am going to delete the social media icons from my con­tact page. One thing that will remain is my email. Feel free to con­tact me. If you know me well, you have my phone num­ber. Please drop me a line any­time. (Well, within rea­son­able. I typ­i­cally don’t answer the phone before 10 am or after 10 pm on Sat­ur­days and Sundays.)