My Social Media Stance

I am not on LinkedIn, there I said it... This seems to be something of a mystery to folks, why are you not on LinkedIn?  You should be on LinkedIn!  I'll send you a link to link up in LinkedIn...

The problem is.... I don't want to me on LinkedIn.  I don't particularly engage with social media; I understand many many people do, I myself personally do not; facebook is extremely minimal for me, Google+ has a message from me saying I won't be using it; just because my YouTube account got forced to create one (and they did that automatically); and I only use twitter to complain to companies about poor service!

Perhaps this is the problem, putting oneself on social media makes you immediately accessible, searchable, findable, but not always in the form nor forum you desire, being pulled from pillar to post.

I've been reading a book by Neem James, essentially about how distracting life is and as a developer, I find the number of distractions I can recount moment on moment amazing... Right now, in an office for programming I hear conversations, phone calls, machines whirring, doors banging, someones mobile ringing... And that's before the things I need to listen out for, like my name being called or members of the team around me needing input on the current project.  This isn't to say I want library like observance of the work space, but it's a lot of chatter, subdivision of an area, hard walls of baffles to stop very noisy equipment disturbing all... they're simple ways to subdivide real-life.

I find all this division of attention can slice into the quality of the work produced.

Social media, doesn't yet seem to contain any solution for the inane chatter you can experience, especially if you have a lot of contacts, spreading ever further as the rule of Six degrees is ever eroded by the web we weave.

Without any way to baffle the sound, stop the noise on Social Media, I've opted not to engage directly with it, save for where the form of the communication reflects me in some way.

I'm not a tweet kind of guy, I'm too verbose and the rich tapestry of life can't be reflected in so few words (plus I hate when tweets start 1/3 - gah).

Then the content of an open social media account, it's a soup of opinion, some good, some bad, both the contributors and readers can choose what they take away from it, or indeed interpret it in different ways.

I suppose the same is true of this very blog, but at least here, I know what I intend and if its misconstrued I only have myself to blame, a facebook post however, could be taken out of context, appear on another timeline or be moved not by a human (who I find quite understandable) but by an algorithm, by something ethereal, something fitting to the best metrics, rather than knowing.

It's a rabbit hole I'm not willing to be driven into, if I chose to pop down so be it, but I won't be forced and I'm yet to see a killer need for it.

As I'm a strong believer in face to face, or direct contact, be that phone, email, text, face to face.  A limited tweet, not so much (I can be very verbose).