Stephanie Rosenbloom, “For the Plugged-In, Too Many
Choices.” New York Times, August 10, 2011.
WHEN Jessica H. Lawrence left her job with the Girl Scouts
of San Gorgonio Council in Redlands, Calif., to pursue a new
life in New York City, she arrived in late January without a
job, an apartment or someone to keep her warm through the
winter nights.
But in less than six months, she found all three — and all
because of Twitter.
The job came after a friend’s tweet inspired her to attend NY
Tech Meetup, where she applied for a job and became the
managing director.
She found her apartment after sending a Twitter message to
the founder of the Midnight Brunch supper club. That scored
her an invitation and — after meeting the owners of the
brownstone where the meal was held — the cellar
apartment, too.
As for the boyfriend, a founder of the Noble Rot wine club,
she discovered him when she began following the Rot’s
Twitter feed. Next week, they’re moving into an apartment in
Williamsburg.
“So you can see why I have this undying love for Twitter,”
said Ms. Lawrence, 32. Yet her devotion to one social
network is not an act of sentimentality — it’s part of a careful
strategy for combating social media burnout. In a time when
anyone with Internet access is expected to be engaged on
multiple networking sites and keep a day job, Ms. Lawrence
decided to focus on a singular site rather than to spread
herself thin among a half-dozen.
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The relentless pressure to partake of the newest networks
was underscored in June with the debut of Google+,
Google’s social networking site. According to Nielsen, social
networking is now the most popular online activity, ahead of
sending e-mails, searching the Internet and playing games.
Put another way: one in every four-and-a-half minutes spent
on the Web is spent on a social networking site or blog. And
last year the average visitor spent 66 percent more time on
such sites than in 2009, when early adopters were already
feeling digitally fatigued.
“I’m on tech overload,” said Ms. Lawrence, who has
Facebook and LinkedIn accounts yet barely uses them
anymore. “I already feel like I’m experiencing slow death by
e-mail.” While she loves technology and has been
experimenting with Google+ since it was introduced, “I’m
having a really hard time justifying adding yet another social
tool to my tool `kit,” she said.
But any attempt by weary networkers to scale back is
complicated by the proliferation of Web sites like Klout and
PeerIndex that are busily computing users’ influence scores
to rank them in an online hierarchy. (On Klout, each user is
assigned a score from 1 to 100. If you’re in the high teens,
you’re average; if you’re in the 40s you have a healthy
following; if you score 100, you’re Justin Bieber).
Depending on the person you ask, this is either awesome or
terrifying. In the future, brands and even potential employers
could conceivably make decisions about you based on your
score. (Some brands, like Virgin America and the Palms
Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, have experimented with
Klout.)
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The most active and organized users of social networks
have daily routines for grooming their digital identities.
Generally, these routines rely on automation and
syndication. For instance, Web sites like Ping.fm, OnlyWire
and Hellotxt enable users to post the same content across
multiple networking sites with a click or two of a mouse.
Other sites, like Buffer, SocialOomph and TwitResponse,
allow users to write postings months in advance and
schedule them for publication at a later date.
“Automation, both in terms of when content goes out and the
syndication, that’s what keeps me from going insane,” said
Josh Kaufman, the author of “The Personal MBA: Master the
Art of Business.” “Otherwise it would just be too much to
manage.”
Mr. Kaufman’s Facebook and LinkedIn accounts are tied to
his Twitter page, so when he posts an update on Twitter, it
appears on all three accounts. “And when I can figure out
how to make it syndicate to Google+, I’ll do that, too,” he
said, though he initially resisted Google+. “Do I really need
another thing to keep track of?” he said he had wondered.
The answer was no, but so far Mr. Kaufman, 29, of Fort
Collins, Colo., has kept his social media routine to less than
30 minutes each morning (well, except for the day he spent
pruning the list of people he followed on Twitter to 85, down
from an indigestible 1,500).
That said, he keeps his social networking dashboards open
on his computer all day to absorb their hiccups of
information. Because he works alone, he likes the “water
cooler effect” of his friends’ feeds: the ease with which he
can say hello to someone far away, if only for a moment.
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When he has to focus, he relies on Freedom, a productivity
application that blocks the Internet for up to eight hours.
Alternatively, he configures his computer so that when he
tries to point his browser to, say, Google+, the computer
takes him to a page on the desktop instead.
“If you use your willpower once to change the environment,”
he said, “there’s no discipline required.”
Some users think all this networking is leading to alienation.
“I like to spend the time with someone in a restaurant than
spend the time on Foursquare telling people I’m in the
restaurant,” said Graham Hill, 40, the founder of the Web
site TreeHugger and the design contest LifeEdited. Speaking
from a cabin in Canada without Internet service, he said he
uses Twitter and Facebook and is poking around Google+,
though he strives to be efficient.
For instance, he will read a book on his Kindle, upload
inspiring quotes and ideas to his Amazon account, then edit
them into Twitter posts, which he schedules to be posted
over the course of several weeks via the monitoring service
HootSuite.com.
Some day, he hopes to hire someone to edit and post
content for him so he can spend more time offline.
“The in-between times are important,” he said, referring to
life’s idle moments, like standing in line at the bank or taking
a taxi, “times when you should be checking in with yourself
instead of trying to be somewhere you’re not.”
Plenty of people have taken a social media detox, or opted
out only to opt back in again. Ms. Lawrence said she
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evaluates all networking sites by asking herself a single
question: “Will it enhance my life?”
Every networking site has its own culture, said Brian Solis, a
principal at Altimeter Group, a technology research firm, and
the author of “The End of Business as Usual.” But each
culture is not right for each and every person.
“Value is in the eye of the beholder,” said Mr. Solis, adding
that a small percentage of readers of his networking sites
said they were suffering from social network fatigue. Then
again, they usually get a second wind.
“Everyone is still talking about filing e-mail bankruptcy,” he
said. “At the end of the day, you still use it.”
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