Ironically enough...

[blue_condition]

following on from my last post, an article on a blog about social networking doubting the need for hyperconnectivity ;)

Living without Twitter with No Regrets.

Of course, he's actually saying that Friendfeed is l33ter than twaitter, but his closing remark is the most interesting part of the article:

Communication is a great thing but over-

Comments

[puritypersimmon]

Has anyone considered 'over-communication' as a displacement activity, pure and simple...There is also the 'I blog therefore I am' element - the apparent conviction that unless you feature on some form of public forum, your existence is not fully validated. Reality TV shows are another example of the latter mindset, imho.

[steer]

One person's over communication is another person's stony silence.

Some people would see livejournal as a verbal torrent compared with the minimalism of twitter. (After all, you can view twitter as livejournal with only short entries allowed).

Some people prefer texts to phone calls, other the opposite way around.

I think it's odd to define one channel of communication as "over communicating" -- they're just sending different information.

Pick the types of communication you like because there are so many these days you'd go mad trying to track them all. :-)

[puritypersimmon]

I agree with all those points, to some extent. Particularly as I don't see them contradicting my own...

There's a reason I put the quotation marks round over-communication, and it's basically the one you've stated. I think sometimes we can analyse peoples' motivations too much, and that LJ, Twitter, FaceBook et al can simply provide a distraction from the tedium of work. Or be a means of avoiding doing stuff that we really don't want to be bothered with. And I think your last statement ties in with what I was thinking - that cherry-picking a few sites, blogs, whatever, is one thing; following a plethora of them to the point of inanity is, imo, a bit sad and obsessive. Feeling that you ought to be doing just that, or else risk either not learning some 'vital' piece of information, or appearing out of the loop, is the vaguely neurotic mindset that I think Pete is concerned with.

[steer]

I'm not sure which way culture will evolve. I can certainly remember being fervently of the opinion that anyone who needed to carry around a phone had seriously got a screw loose. I admit I was wrong -- a mobile phone is so useful in so many situations (missed meetings, contacting people when you don't know where they are, quick text to say "hi" and catch up, arranging coffee with people "because you're near their office") that it totally enriches my life and I would very much miss one.

I just don't know which way society will evolve but I suspect it will evolve to a more message oriented instant update one where people can instantly pass messages in formats of their choice to those sets of users they wish to receive them. I also suspect that a complex set of social mores about when to ignore, respond later and respond instantly to such messages will arise. My guess is that the actual technologies to deliver them (whether twitter, email, IM or whatever) will increasingly blur to the point where only geeks care.

[steer]

Pick those means of communication which suit you.

I can live without twitter.

Some freaks can live without the internet entirely.

Indeed I've met people this year who have lived their whole life without any electronic communication.

Couldn't manage myself mind you.

I die if I am disconnected from the network for too long.

[thecesspit]

But friendfeed appears to feed in all your Twitter tweets into it. So not having twitter running wouldn't actually mean you'd not read your twitters.

Aside : I hate blogs about the web and blogging. Seems to be crawling up your fundament.

[steer]

Incidentally, are you sure this isn't another of your "I don't see the point of this tampax" moments? As I see it, "twitter" is for people who want up to the minute low bandwidth updates on the minutiae of their friends' lives. I don't picture you in that class somehow.

Now if the application was "bitter" which provided up to the minute updates of who of your mates in the area was feeling pissed off and fancied sinking a few in the pub, I reckon you'd be signed up immediately. :-)

[ravensthorpe]

There's an opening for an Uncle Mort grumbling applet surely.