Helen Keegan :: Blog :: Giving it up for Lent - or - Death by Social Software

This is my first blog post in 6 weeks, and I’ve just had a month ‘off’ social software (well, not quite – an addict is an addict is an addict, as they say…). In fact, the last post I wrote was never finished, but I’m going to put it here now as a reminder of the beneficial effects of getting away from technology and going camping….

“Skype has become integral to my existence and ability to communicate (just) in time with others. Many a work-related crisis been solved via a Skype conference call. Skype emoticons can say a thousand words... well maybe not. But you can at least reassure one another that after that rather tense conference call relating to finances you are still going to have a dance and drink when you see one another. You can tell somebody you love them; you can punch them in the face – the choice is yours.

But for many of us the tide is turning with Skype, the reason being that it has now become a major tool in our communication armoury, a tool which enables us to see when our contacts are online, even when they login (unless you turn off that setting, which I have done recently), and ‘demands’ an instant response. Or at least it did.

Once it reaches the stage when as soon as you login to Skype, at least 7 flashing blue boxes with the names of friends/colleagues/in-betweens appear in the bottom of your screen while you’re trying to deal with a mountain of emails and deadlines in between meetings, it begins to feel like the virtual equivalent of having 7 incredibly demanding toddlers pulling at your clothes screaming ‘ME ME ME’. Obviously this isn’t the case, but when you’re drowning in a sea of deadlines, papers and reports it has the same visceral effect.

Hence my recent adoption of the ‘invisible’ mode (oops, giving the secrets away now!), or if I’m feeling particularly sociable I’ll set it to ‘unavailable’. Terribly antisocial, and possibly rude (?) but one has to resort to desperate measures sometimes in order to try to negotiate some time ‘out’ in order to ‘put time in’.

I know I’m not the only person feeling this (and adopting the same practices). Only last week was I comparing notes with a colleague about Skype-overload and he pointed out that it’s highly probable that the most commonly-used Skype conversational opener nowadays is ‘are you there?’ – the reason being that more and more of us are ‘drowning in a sea of Skype’ and are adopting practices which cloud our availability to others. But now that everybody’s pretending to be invisible or unavailable, we all know that in all likelihood we are really there, hence the question. So its usefulness is almost rendered useless.

Another similar(ly annoying) phenomenon is that of emails from within Second Life. Oh yes, now that people have realised that if you’re not ‘in-world’ any instant messages that they send you will be forwarded to your email account, they don’t need to bother sending you ‘proper’ emails any more. Now while I don’t see any problem with this in principle (after all, an email is an email is an email….), it does actually render one’s inbox even more unwieldy when it’s already being bombarded by messages from the various SL groups you are now a member of. You then have to scan through to distinguish group messages from personal messages (I’m sure there’s a way around this but I’ve NOT HAD THE TIME TO EXPLORE!)

Which brings me on to the INBOX, oh, the inbox… now I love my inboxes, but it is rather worrying to realise that for the past year I constantly have in the whereabouts of 1500 unread emails. Obviously they’re not essential or I would have read them, but I find it hard to just dismiss them in case there’s something useful in there somewhere. Although I’ll never have the time to find out so I should just bin them (or at least mark as read).

The problem is that I am a member of these 30-40 newsgroups for a reason, and am loathed to leave. I just want to have the time to read the damn digests!

And then there are all the other minor emails that through a sense of (online) social responsibility and community membership I do try to answer – you know the ones. You’ve been ‘nudged’ (Explode – although I do think it’s great), someone’s commented on your Flickr photos (again, I LOVE Flickr), a new MySpace friend request/comment/message…

I must confess to being possibly the most antisocial member of MySpace. I only joined in order to download a tune. A friend set it up for me, and he friended me, and before I knew it I had real friends friending (fine, I love them), but then loose acquaintances, and then complete strangers and now buildings! (Ok, there’s a person behind it – but a building for chrissakes….). It goes without saying that I ignore them all and have a strict policy of visiting MySpace once a month to reply to the comments my real friends have made – although by that point it’s useless as we’ve seen one another and spoken F2F. But lots of them exist in MySpace being musicians and the like so I do enjoy some occasional peripheral participation BUT ONLY WITH PEOPLE I KNOW.

And as for Second Life, what can I say? What begun as an exploration into this hyped up virtual world soon became a (potential) research project. The problem is that there’s no time for real life anymore what with all this online social software malarkey, although I do manage to (just about) manage. But once you try to live a SL as well, where does the time come from? I’ll tell you where – sleep. Excursions into SL have to be scheduled into 'free' time, i.e. from 11pm until 3am during the week and entire weekends.

I know this is a whinge and I’m probably being a bit of a grump, but the whole thing’s just so exhausting. Trying to negotiate a myriad of physical and virtual existences, identities, roles and responsibilities is really starting to take its toll, and judging by many conversations I’ve had with colleagues recently I’m not the only one who’s starting to feel the burn (out).

And yet at the same time technology is so integral to our existence on so many levels (although as social software researchers perhaps we feel it more than most?), and while I’m currently drowning….”

See? Didn’t even finish the sentence (a friend arrived). But it’s interesting reading that back now as it positively OOZES communication overload. Unsurprising when you have somehow ended up with 8 email accounts, 2 SL avatars, 2 Flickr accounts (1 for RL, one for SL) 3 personal blogs, 5 research blogs, the list goes (went) on... it was like drowning in a sea of communication and collaboration, teaching and meetings being the only times spent away from a computer... let alone finding the time to read 'The Tyranny of the Moment'!

Ironically, although I adopted a strict policy over Easter of only checking emails 3 times per day, no blogging, no SL-ing, no Skyping, I became horrendously addicted to Flickr communities instead. And it’s such fun!

There’s definitely something seasonal going on here (for me). Personally I find Sept-Dec ripe for blogging. SL is great in January/February when it’s freezing cold and miserable outside; pure escapism. But Flickr lends itself to humour and moblogging (K800i specifically) and is just so much ‘sunnier’.

Well, whatever. The fact is that social software and online social networking is brilliant – whether for work or pleasure – and I can’t imagine life any other way.

Just need to remember to take a camping trip from time-to-time…