Taking a sobering sip from the firehouse

 

 

If my memory is right, my first interactions with social media came in third grade when I thought I was too clever and dabbled with impersonating various classmates over AIM.  Since then, I have participated on BB Forums, Dugg and buried, uploaded and tagged thousands of pictures (with words, not names – this was before Facebook) ‘hearted’ and downloaded songs, and done a bit of light MMORPGing. In years following my initial transgression, I hope that I have reformed myself, though I’ve taken more of a backseat ‘lurker’ approach to many of the sites that I now frequent, posting or otherwise adding content at a rate that seems to have dropped off significantly from my early use.

 

Why might this be? Perhaps it has to do with taking on more adult responsibilities: living off campus, working in a number of environments, etc. – I have far less free time than when I was a Freshman, when I joined Twitter and Tumblr and is structured quite differently than in high school, when my distractions were chiefly on Flickr and Facebook.  In earnest though, I think I do as much reading of certain sites as I did posting. As a user, perhaps I feel like it is less of a risk, less investment and much less work simply to read other peoples’ posts than to work to craft your own. Compared with the struggle of writing a well-balanced Facebook status update, reducing down to a cogent tweet or crafting a media-laden Tumblr post (all the while maintaining a certain online persona) the constant dopamine drip of reading posts from bloggers I’ve picked or friends in the echelon of “top news” is much more relaxing.

 

Rather than go through the trouble of adding a new photo to Flickr (and cross-posting it to Tumblr, which then automatically updates Twitter), most mornings I find myself wading through ten pages of overnight Tumblr content (about 100 posts), stopping only when I recognize the posts that were among the last things I read before going to sleep.  I used to have this “can’t miss it” attitude for Twitter before giving up in frustration when I realized I had also unwittingly followed over 400 accounts. (I have since worked towards reducing that unhealthy number.) I stopped tweeting as often (and switched over primarily to Tumblr), but felt that my user experience was not overly different whether or not I added much to either site.  I like to think I was an evangelist for a number of sites, but without much feedback on either service, I am left with a growing cynicism about the democratic distribution of attention and activity on these networks (and even a bit of self-doubt about whether I am actually good at online socializing). I hope that while taking this class my tweet-rate will increase slightly – there’s really no excuse for not being able to peck 140 characters once in a while.

-@ari /klick / here