Very recently indeed… I watched in virtual disbelief as someone I know quite well aired their personal life’s dirty linen on facebook…

I had read lots of those stories all over the place about people doing it, but never actually witnessed it first hand… Until now.

What does it say about the world we live in… Or how we choose to communicate that we announce our relationship status via facebook before efectively resolving our issues in our real world first? Or that we seem to need to let people know that we are popping to get a cup of tea via twitter…

Main headlines here in the UK saw the media pointing out that research now shows social networking sites to be diminishing a childs ability to concentrate for periods of time…

I use these modes of online communication and it has led me to think hard about the effect on me and how I live my life and run my business… Let me explain…

I laughed out loud at Randy Gage’s latest blog post talking about one of the critters you do not want to be on Twitter is the ‘TMI Guy’ which stands for ‘Too much information’ — he says:

The TMI Guy

Information is valuable and we all got on Twitter to get more of it.  But there is such a thing as too much information.  The TMI guy (or gal) suffers from the delusion that their life is interesting, and Tweets a steady stream of inane blather from rising until they mercifully log off and go to bed. The typical stream from someone in this category looks like this:

@VacuousTwit  going to the mall, 2 minutes ago
@VacuousTwit  I so need a manicure, 4 minutes ago
@VacuousTwit  my cat just spit up a hairball yuck! 7 minutes ago
@VacuousTwit  anyone see Buffy last night? 10 minutes ago
@VacuousTwit  pink t-shirt or blue one, decisions! 12 minutes ago
@VacuousTwit  No tweets from Melissa, bummer, 14 minutes ago
@VacuousTwit  Coco Puffs, yum!, 16 minutes ago
@VacuousTwit  BRB, gotta poop, 19 minutes ago
@VacuousTwit  just got up, brushing my teeth, 20 minutes ago

The TMI Twitterer believes we’re all fascinated to learn that the mail arrived, what they had for lunch, or that they need to buy maxi pads.   We’re not.  In fact, we really don’t give a shit.

Not even your mother wants to hear a minute-by-minute broadcast of your day.  Your life is just not that interesting.  This is the online equivalent of the Valley Girl.

Please note if you are @lancearmstrong, @THE_REAL_SHAQ, or @MCHammer, you get an exemption.  Because we’re fanatically obsessed with celebrity, we want to know all the minutia about every thing that ever happens to and around you, including when you cut your toenails. 

That made me laugh…

Last week, I read Caroline Adams Miller stating in her blog that most procrastination experts agree on the problem with technologies like Twitter and Facebook — that they contribute to further procrastination.

I’ve certainly pondered these new technologies as possibly being deeply addictive distractions from life itself… And, as Caroline noted, you end up
“. . . commenting about what other people are doing, or commenting on something you are going to do, but you are not actually doing yet.”

Is that the case? I always cover a topic of interest to me and (I believe) my readers… Then it gets whizzed over to facebook and I offer up a tweet in relation to it… Isn’t that they way to use these technologies?

Do these seductive technologies push us to the sidelines of life? Are we really too busy writing those 200 text messages a day to actually stay engaged in our own lives? 

I can empathise with those that think the problem with these technologies is that they are incredibly seductive… I think they are too, to some extent…

They offer up a way of immediately communicating with lots of people, they immediately and constantly available and for some, they are immediately rewarding… So if we are angry about a relationship split… We can angrily and perhaps quite childishly blurt it out to loads of people… Uh-oh…

We make rational decisions over irrationally short periods of time that suck us in… And I have just watched it happen to people I know…

So I think that at the same time, these social networking tools don’t just entertain us, or offer us small business guys a way to distribute our message… I think they feed a basic human need for relatedness…

I think that we get a mini-addiction to that though, what do you think? Like an eating disorder of some kind, we binge… And when such a thing happens, there is little or no satiation, only increasing tolerance and use…

As can be read in the books of Neil Postman, who knew this all too well. Stating that these technologies, seemingly tools for productivity, can undermine our ability to be productive.

Now I tend to think I am in control of what I am doing… I was interviewed recently for Rapport magazine here in the Uk and I realised what a conscious process I have for my social networking… Although some may see that as an addictive trait, I don’t believe so… You have to love the way I dismissed that train of thought without validating my side of the argument…

What do you think then, are we in control of our online social networking?

Or are we falling into a big black hole….?