I love social networks.
They’re how I follow the news, get different perspectives, stay in touch with friends — and make new ones. When people complain that online connections are just a poor substitute for “real life”, I just shake my head and tell them they’re doing it wrong. And as I’ve argued passionately in Cognitive evolution and revolution, The future of civil liberties, A grassroots social network activist’s perspective, and Freedom not fear, combining social network and real world activism is a great opportunity to regain our rights online and off.
But there are downsides as well. Facebook constantly changing its interface and finding new ways to violate my privacy, the arrogance and elitism of the guys running Google+ and their evil naming policy (along the incessant circling over the last few days), Diaspora*’s inability to edit posts or block obnoxious people … and the time I spend checking FB, G+, D*, Twitter, Quora, Dreamwidth, tribe.net, free-association and elsewhere.
So it’s time for a break from social networks.
See you in a week or two!
jon
jon | 28-Sep-11 at 9:19 pm | Permalink
yet another episode of “why I hate Facebook”.
i get a lot of email notifications so since i’m taking a break i wanted to turn some of them off. i manage to find the settings / notification page which … lists the notifications i’ve recently gotten???? what’s that doing on the settings page? but anyhow, i scroll down and find the list of 16 categories of notifications: Facebook, Photos (wait aren’t those on Facebook too?), Groups, Other Updates From Facebook, etc. i click edit on the first one, and it brings up a grayed-out list where 4 items are selected. i try to unselect one and it says “to customize individual email notifications uncheck the box under Email Frequency” at the top of the page. i go up to the top of the page, click the box ….
and now all of my notifications are enabled in every single one of the 16 categories.
wtf
jon | 28-Sep-11 at 9:27 pm | Permalink
Meanwhile on Google+ I went to post this using the “share” button on the top right. I added the photo and then cut-and-paste the text. But it was too long so the “share” button was off the bottom of my screen. So I zoomed out a few times in the browser until the text was unreadable but at least the share button was there. But I hadn’t selected any circles, so it popped me up a list (now in a miniscule font of course) and I selected Public. Unfortunately at this point I accidentally clicked elsewhere on the page and the whole sharing area disappeared leaving me back where I had started.
Yeah, it really is time for a break.
jon | 10-Oct-11 at 10:05 am | Permalink
What would you like to introduce to your life?
Introduce no more than one or two rituals at a time
and make sure they become habitual before you introduce new ones.
"Incremental change is better than ambitious failure.
Success feeds on itself."
— Tal Ben-Shahar, Happier, p. 9-10
It’s been a mighty relaxing ten days. My break wasn’t quite complete: I used Twitter, Facebook, and email a few times each to arrange logistics, and spent a couple of hours reading blogs one night to see what was going on in the world. Even so, it was a dramatically different rhythm. Which makes it a great opportunity to rethink how I’m engaging with social media.
As a first step, last night and this morning, I checked the places I usually hang out. Have I mentioned recently how much I like social networks? Usually I don’t hit all of them in order, so it was interesting to compare-and-contrast. Each of them has a different feel — and a different focus:
It sure seems like a ridiculously long list … in fact my first reaction was "no wonder I’m so much more relaxed when I’m taking a break from online." Then again I don’t want to give any of them up — especially since almost all of them are places where I hang out with a diverse group of people — including some good friends — who I don’t stay in touch with any other way.** So yeah, it seems like a good time to look at my rituals.
Since I want to spend more time on Dreamwidth and Diaspora *, I’ll make those the focus of my start-the-day ritual: checking them first, sharing some links on D* and writing a DW blog post, and jumping into the comments in both places.
Here’s to incremental change!
jon
PS: It’s easy enough to tweet the links and share them on Twitter, Facebook, and Google+ as well — and for privacy and civil liberties stories it’s not so hard to cross-post them to tribe and free-association too. But at what point does it become too much and lead me to distraction? Hmm, dunno; I’ll have to experiment.
* where Harvard student Alisha Ramos posted a link to her’ senior thesis project Where are the ladies
** Hacker News and Quora are the exceptions here, but they’re important for professional purposes.
Bix | 10-Dec-11 at 4:44 am | Permalink
I enjoyed reading your three comments here. It characterizes my experience, even though I only use a handful of the services you do, and not so often at that. Your Facebook comment, #1, is spot-on!