This article in Time Magazine points out that finding your former high school class mates has never been easier, thanks to Facebook, alumni sites and other social sites.
There’s another angle to the story, however. When you go online, you can figure out who’s successful and who fell through the cracks. With a mere click, you can find out who has started looking old, who’s still hot and who’s still married to whom. You can figure out where you stand in your high school pecking order without attending the high school reunion. In other words, you can figure out many of those things that motivate many people to attend reunions. For that reason, some have pointed at social sites as the reason many classes are skipping their reunions entirely.
I’ve previously written about a fascinating marshmallow experiment here and here.
To set the stage, keep in mind that marshmallows are the equivalent of crack cocaine for young children. In the experiment, numerous four-year olds were each left alone with a marshmallow and told that they could eat it if they wanted. They were also told that if they could wait until the experimenter returned (which would happen 15 minutes later), they could have two marshmallows.
Only about 30% of the children had the discipline to wait for the experimenter to return. When the psychologists followed up on these children fourteen years later, they found some startling things. Those four-year-olds who exerted the willpower to wait for two marshmallows scored an average of more than 200 points higher on the SAT than those who couldn’t wait. Those who could wait also show themselves to be more cooperative, more able to work under pressure and more self-reliant. In sum, they were dramatically more able to achieve their goals than those who couldn’t wait.
Which leads me to this thought: Are Internet social sites the cyber-equivalent of marshmallow dispensers? Since reading of the marshmallow experiment, I have repeatedly thought of inability of many people to resist spending hours on social sites such as Facebook and Twitter. I also think of those who burn long hours on MySpace and those who are non-stop texters. Perhaps Internet news junkies belong in the same category.
I don’t know the exact numbers, but there are numerous folks who aren’t getting nearly enough important things done in their lives (things THEY consider to be important) who are spending immense numbers of hours chatting and gossiping. I personally know some of these people. If these were retired people without any daily obligations, it would be one thing. Many of them, however, are blowing countless chances to make significant progress on goals that they themselves have set.
I remember the good old days, when I received a dozen or so emails every day at the office, thereby obviating the need to send and receive paper letters on those matters. Then something unproductive happened. As I started getting more and more emails, I found that they were becoming more fragmented, like stretched-out conversations, and more lost in a sea of emails that tried to sell me something or tried to make sure that I was constantly updated as to nothing very important.
Keeping up with email, then, has become both an incredible tool and a huge time drain. I think of that every day as I read and create 100 emails, many of which require detailed responses. Email, which was once a way to avoid sending and receiving paper letters, is now taking up several hours of every day. Why don’t I turn it off and get a lot more done? Because, every day, I end up decided that I don’t want to throw out the baby with the bath-water. I love-hate the way email barely often enough distracts my attention to something that barely often enough requires my attention.
Sam Anderson explores our new attention-divided culture in a New York Magazine article titled, “In Defense of Distraction”:
This is troubling news, obviously, for a culture of BlackBerrys and news crawls and Firefox tabs—tools that, critics argue, force us all into a kind of elective ADHD. The tech theorist Linda Stone famously coined the phrase “continuous partial attention” to describe our newly frazzled state of mind. American office workers don’t stick with any single task for more than a few minutes at a time; if left uninterrupted, they will most likely interrupt themselves. Since every interruption costs around 25 minutes of productivity, we spend nearly a third of our day recovering from them. We keep an average of eight windows open on our computer screens at one time and skip between them every twenty seconds.
Twitter, undeniably addictive to at least some of its advocates, has only been around since early 2006. The co-founder of Twitter, Evan Williams, talked for eight minutes at TED about his product.
Twitter was originally invented as a means for sending “simple status updates to friends.” It allows you to say what you’re doing in 140 characters or less, with those people interested in you able to get those updates. According to Williams, Twitter “makes people feel more connected and in touch, sharing moments as things happen.” It allows your friends “to know what it’s like to be there.”
Twitter use is exploding. It’s now ten times bigger than it was at the beginning of 2008. According to this entry at Wikipedia, Twitter has 55 million monthly visitors.
Williams concludes his talk by noting that some Twitter users have used Twitter to enable real-time mass-action by armies of fellow Twitter users.
I”ll confess that I’m not a Twitter user (though I did set up an account due to the constant urging of a real-life friend, but I haven’t actually used it). I don’t think I’ll ever be a Twitter addict based on what I know about Twitter. I prefer writing in paragraphs rather than writing chopped up sentences. I don’t want real time commentary,even from my closest of friends–I’d rather you save it up a bit and then we spend quality time together exchanging our stories with more context and color. Also, I like to get away from my computer and phone for long stretches–I recharge by getting totally away from people. I’m also suspicious that many people are deluding themselves that their on-line contacts are true “friends,” in that we don’t have the that kind of cognitive capacity.
None of this is to deny that Twitter might sometimes be useful, even possibly life-saving in times of national crisis. I suspect, though, that Twitter is mostly word fidgeting–an addiction seemingly important due to the powerful illusion that motion–doing anything–constitutes progress. I’ll admit that many important inventions were derided in the early-going (e.g., the telephone). I might be wrong when I demean Twitter as a serious mode of communication.
Writing about Twitter reminds me of a recent book in which each author attempts to capture his or her entire life in six words or less.
Without further ado, here’s that eight-minute speech by Evan Williams, the co-founder of Twitter.
As usual my head is abuzz with the social media explosion and the impact technology has on my world. While communication has always been a part of the technology, folks that barely own computers are becoming familiar with Linkedin, Facebook, myspace, and twitter. iPhones are being advertised so deliciously on television ads that my lust [...]
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