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| Wassily Kandinsky Several Circles |
Obviously, how one uses social media is as individual as the people behind their blogs, whom I get to meet through their writing. Prior to this blog, I did explore some of the social networks. Fb did not do anymore for me than provide status updates that I either already knew about or was not particularly interested in. "Having dinner. Chewing." "I'm seeing stars. Again." Twitter never interested me, which is not to say that it does not have its purpose or that there aren't authors who are hilarious, profane or profound in 140 characters or less.
Whenever I am invited to "follow or join me on fb, twitter, G+...", I am acutely aware of two things: time and internet clutter. Multiple social networking sites compete for our collective attention and time, set up to attract marketing, but are often distracting and time-consuming. It's difficult to resist the temptation of following links, which lead to other links....
Most recently, G+ was added to the fray and I had the opportunity to explore it. I do think that controlling who sees what type of information is a good idea. Then again, what I share with my closest RL friends and family is not something that I would release into the (public) internet domain, especially when the laws regarding privacy and personal information have yet to be modernized.
While the introduction of circles does appeal to my organizational obsession, I would end up with several circles of one, for those friends who share one particular interest, but not the rest of them. In a 10 minute conversation, I can share and get the status update that would take me considerably longer online.
Social media is in its toddler stage and I am looking forward to future ideas and development that will allow us to individualize and aggregate everything into one network.
In the meantime, I have books and blogs to read, friends to meet and circles to draw.
Meh.
Hey, Wassily. That took 5 minutes. Time well spent.