30th
Trying to make this work
I’ve known for a while — and the sentiment has only grown over the past few weeks — that there is something about the way I use and interact with the contemporary social publishing tools and the surrounding culture — sites like Twitter/FriendFeed/etc — that isn’t quite working for me. Not to imply that those sites aren’t working in general, just that something is out of alignment for me individually.
Background: Six months or so ago I made a conscious decision to establish more of a web presence again. I had all but stopped writing on my personal site after taking my current job, but at the same time much of what I was thinking about and working on was designed to help that ecosystem thrive. So while I’m naturally shy in person, I bit the bullet and tried to actively engage with people on the web.
The best part of those sites is when I learn something new. Not just meet someone new (there are several billion people in the world — meeting people is easy, or so sez Thom Yorke) and not just meet someone smarter (there are billions of them, too) but to establish a connection with people that think about the things I am interested in. Me, I’m interested in things like computer science and intellectual property law right now. Politics, music, art, sure, but what really fascinates me most these days is algorithms, programming languages, ip licensing, stuff like that. So I was not simply seeking any random group, but rather a peer group.
Because the dirty little truth is that I care about the world of social media, public relations, silicon valley, startup culture, etc., about as much as I care about search engine optimization or the names of celebrity babies. It is the context in which we operate and live, but that alone does not make it interesting. In fact, most of it is a distraction — navels are not novel, and gazing at them just takes your eye of anything interesting up ahead.
(This entire post is an exercise in hypocrisy, which is why I’m burying it on a feed that has few readers.)
To address the situation, I’m aggressively pruning my reading lists — the thinking man’s attempt at going ostrich. I’m continuing to ween my Reader subscriptions, moving people that discuss social media and the like into a separate folder. I created a “Social” list on FF and as people post or like things that I would preferred not to be distracted at the time, I’m moving them into the Social list and off of the Home page. And I already don’t read Twitter other than the occasional search for comments directed at me or topics I’m interested in, so that’s not as much of an issue.
It’s not that I don’t like you or your blog, it’s that I just don’t like that I’m reading it all the time. So now I’ll just shunt those posts off to a place where I can collect and read them at a later date. Please don’t take that personally — information overload and the propensity for distraction just really has me down right now. It was either this or stop using these sites entirely.
I guess I just want these tools to serve me in a more professional and academic capacity, rather than a social or entertainment capacity. Hopefully this will work.
