Great post. First of all you are not alone in these opinions, as evidenced by all of our comments! In fact The Daily Show did a funny comedy bit about exactly what you describe: the technology overload and “a life spent monitoring” rather than doing. I’ve thought about this for awhile, ever since I realized I just wasn’t that into Facebook even though of course I am on there. I think generation plays a role here — generation or perhaps time of life. I can’t comment too much on generation without making utterly unsupportable generalizations, so I’ll talk about time of life. I have too much to do at work and at home to spend time on Facebook catching up with everyone on a daily basis, but I can imagine if I were 22 and had an entry-level job that I was way too smart for, I would have loads of extra time — plus it would be my social lifeblood to spend time doing stupid things like poking people electronically (or whatever that app is), because I would still be young enough that social connections provided me with validity and contributed to my development. I just think younger people live life in packs, so what the crowd is doing is far more important to them and to their development as adults than it is to me. At this point I’ve found a partner, bought a house, developed professionally and am living my own life, not the collective life of the pack. And I think these are normal, healthy stages of development but my point is that time of life colors what and how you interact with various technologies and social phenomenon. I don’t think there is any danger that we won’t collectively “grow out of it.” At least I hope we will! Thanks for all the great writing.

Anyway, I also agree with the issues being raised here. But wanted to just quickly note that coincidence.

Your observations and viewpoints really resonate with my own. I especially enjoyed this paragraph:

“I like the idea of being ’sophisticated’ for choosing technology instead of a drone doing everything out of fear or greed. And I like the idea of really learning how to incorporate technology that I really do love and really think has great benefits into a world that still needs to have boundaries and breathing space and conversation instead of just giving personal updates.”

I agree wholeheartedly on almost everything, other than you questioning yourself because the majority may be right just because they are the majority. I respect you for actually questioning yourself, something that few people do now, probably due to the fact that they are mindlessly following all of these tech trends!

I use these things (Twitter, Facebook, newsletter list) only as a tool to reach people and figure that most people do not read all of their feeds, or regularly look at their RSS or side email accounts, and that if they have signed up for more than one of these options that I have a chance of catching their interest possibly through one of these three ways. I rarely read any Tweets or Facebook posts of others. Honestly, I don’t have the time to get sucked in.

This all calls to mind a book that is a cult classic The Four Arguments For The Elimination Of Television. It’s old (1978), but written by a successful advertiser and about how he eventually could not be in that business anymore. I think a lot of his observations, which are mostly about how people are manipulated by the media and how tv was really created for advertising purposes relates in the sense that aren’t these new “media” sources really created in order for someone to eventually make a buck because advertisers can target large groups of people?

This perspective might help us all to evaluate if something is really a tool for us, or a tool for someone else’s agenda to reach us- whether it is direct advertising or indirect advertising through building the popularity of someone’s blog, and whether we are okay with that.

Okay…I could go on and on…wish we could all meet for cofee talk!