Social Media Overload

Is it just me, or do you also yearn for the weekend just so you can disconnect from various glowing screens that have your brain in a perpetual state of information overload Monday through Friday? I am mixed on the social media revolution. On the one hand, it’s an incredible concept. Who would have thought we’d have the ability to broadcast in real-time to millions our latest client news or glee over getting our hair “did,” even just five short years ago? Just last week I was able to determine who anonymously sent me flowers thanks to the sharing of information on Facebook.

But I’ll be the first to admit, does anyone REALLY care about my updates and Tweets? Sure it is mildly amusing at times to see what contacts in various parts of the world and in various professions are doing at that moment, but when I stop and think about the number of truly useful and meaningful updates and Tweets I have come across, does it justify the time wasted (not to mention frequent annoyance) of combing through thousands of others?

Thanks to the relative ease of social media and software that identifies people you might know, it doesn’t take winning the lottery for friends to come out of the woodwork. Granted, reconnecting with a pen pal I met in Florida when I was ten and a long-lost grade school friend has been great (and something that without Facebook likely never would have happened), but sometimes I wonder if our people skills are dwindling these days. It’s so easy to meet online and exchange comments online with one of your hundreds or even thousands of friends and contacts, but how would it be if you met them face to face and tried to have a conversation? For starters, I am not sure we would recognize most of our “friends.” I suppose it’s the blessing and the curse… the ability to connect with people you never would have, but is it at the expense of really taking the time to develop true relationships with those around us? At the end of the day, are we really as connected as we think we are?

I often wonder where we are going to be in another five years. Real-time sharing of information is certainly an interesting concept and we all seem to be scrambling to see what we can do with it and how we can leverage it for ourselves and our business, but right now it seems a chaotic free-for-all as everyone tries to get their share of the action. Will we soon come to know Twitterers anonymous (Twitonymous)? People who, when separated from their wireless devices, experience some sort of dangerous withdrawal because they can’t bear the thought of not knowing what is going on with everyone else right at that moment? Will it ever Twindle or will the Tweementum continue? My head hurts thinking about it. In the meantime, I find myself hitting the extremes… after a week of social media overload, I am ridiculously excited at the prospect of showing up at a trailhead to hike this weekend and being the only person there and far, far from cell phone range.