I can’t keep up with the Kardashians. Or Ashton and Demi’s tweets. Or that viral YouTube video of the baby who thinks a magazine is a broken iPad. Or the millions upon billions of tumbles, check-ins, podcasts, posts, RSS feeds, wikis, tags and updates.
It’s all too much.
Social media has me feeling like I just can’t keep up with anything.
It’s like that growing pile of clean laundry on your dining room table you keep meaning to get to, one mismatched sock at a time.
Keeping up with social media requires time management skills and dedication.
It is a job that doesn’t pay and you work overtime.
Let’s hypothesize and imagine I want to make scalloped potatoes as a side dish for dinner. So one afternoon I “clock in” and search Google for some online recipes.
A few attention-deficit clicks later, I am wading through the Snopes website, trying to figure out if the green tinged potatoes lurking in my cupboard will poison me.
Once I snap to my senses and reign myself back in, I return to my initial cooking website and find a recipe I like. I think about all of my Facebook friends who might like to try it.
So I share the recipe on Facebook. I might as well tweet about it, too, right? And, why not do a blog post about my latest culinary attempt? I check-in on Foursquare at the grocery store as I buy the ingredients, all while filming myself shopping and interviewing the supermarket produce manager. And of course, I plan to do a podcast of my entire scalloped potato cooking experience.
And what am I going to wear?
And this is all before I have even peeled the first potato.
Looking ahead, after the cooking is done I need to upload my finished video to YouTube. I should probably post some photos to my Flickr account, then tweet those, too. I could create a nice graphic for my video and post it to my blog. And I should definitely tweet the link to my YouTube video, then upload it to Facebook.
Not to mention, I haven’t begun filming part two when I sample my dish. And how to set the table. And the origin of scalloped potatoes. And…what am I talking about anymore?
Just like an Internet search engine, my mind bounces from topic to topic—ranking information that might not be relevant to what I am searching for.
I don’t know about you but I am already exhausted just thinking about it.
And all of this scalloped potato fanfare is for what? Or who?
I am certainly not an overachiever in the kitchen, but how much can one person talk endlessly about themselves and what they are doing? Apparently 200 million people, according to twitter stats.
Unless a paycheck is involved, this faux importance of daily existence seems like an elaborate waste of time.
For me, the old adage “quality over quantity” will have to do for now. Or with social media has it become quantity over quality?
Let me do an online search and I will get back to you… one mismatched sock at a time.
Photo by Daniel Mutter
Love this one, Aimee! Man I miss writing for The Crow’s Nest. This column reminds me of the article that explains how the internet rewires our brains and the way we process information. I think it’s called, “Is Google Making Us Stoopid?” You should check it out.
Thanks Nicole! Gonna check it out now.