Taking a Breather From Social Media? Maybe We’re Doing It Wrong

Today, Colin Walker had a great, philosophical post on taking time out from social media to gain perspective. While on vacation, it was almost like he broke some addiction he had with social media services like Twitter and FriendFeed, realizing that:

“The further you drift away from the conversation the harder it is to become enthusiastic about the direction it takes and this is the curse of social media: it is addictive in the sense that you need to keep an involvement in order to maintain an overview and monitor the breadth of conversation rather than trying to control it in one location.”

This piece he wrote really spoke to me because I sometimes question my involvement in this entire social media/technoblogosphere niche. Monday through Friday, I blog here (OK, more occasionally here), but daily for Microsoft’s Channel 10 and ReadWriteWeb. These are real jobs and I try to treat them as such. I wake up at a decent hour, I read the news, I participate best I can on the social services du jour and I go about my day. I know here and there I’ve made contributions that moved a conversation forward or brought in some great pageviews, but while I may have ended up as a paid blogger by happy coincidence, there are other bloggers, both paid and unpaid, who are truly social media superstars. I know this because I certainly work with some of them. Plus, there are those who seem to have some sort of social media superpower (*cough* Louis Gray) or fresh voice that draws the crowd to them. The rest of us? We’re just moths to their flame.

Social media superstar I am not – when the weekend rolls around, I crave distraction. I want to trade the glow of my laptop screen for fresh air and sunshine and new activities…offline activities. Activities where Twitterberry may be there for me, but I don’t need to check it as obsessively as one would check Twhirl. This “taking a break” has become more and more of a trend as of late, leading me to wonder if I’m suffering from social media burnout or whether I’m secretly just a luddite who has somehow mastered the tools of an early adopter.

OK, I exaggerate. I’m far from a luddite – technology definitely excites me and writing about it for a living is a pretty good job as far as jobs go, but this constant trying to drink from the firehouse at full force is only knocking me out by week’s end….which led me to realize…I could be doing it wrong! Now, I can’t give up RSS, but do I need to check Twitter and FriendFeed 24/7? No. I’ll check and converse on them when I feel like it…and I’ll enjoy it more when I do. Like Colin said:

“the conversation will go on without you regardless of who you are. People will still have ideas and discussion will still develop around those ideas.”

The conversation will always be there, I’ll join it when I can. I don’t need to be in on every thread, every time. These tools are supposed to be enhancing our enjoyment of the web – they’re not supposed to addict us, pressure us, or feel like work. If they feel that way to you, then you need to take a breather too.

And if admitting that I enjoy balance in my life means that I have to turn in my geek badge and get kicked out of the clubhouse, so be it. I want use these services and enjoy them without being overloaded – and that’s also how I need to evaluate them in order to gain insight into their potential for mainstream use…because what’s most exciting to me is how social media, new technologies, and new trends exit the early adopter crowd and trickle down into *real* life.

And by “real life” I mean when something that the early adopters rave about all of a sudden crosses over to the rest of the mainstream world or when a business starts implementing social features via Enterprise 2.0 software or when a brick-and-mortar company sets up a presence on Twitter. This is when technology is impacting the world as opposed to just impacting the twitterverse or the blogosphere. This is when it really matters. I’d argue that this is also when it really matters to the startup that introduced it to us too. Unless it’s a side project or pet project for the developers involved, then it’s an attempt by a business to make real money. And let me tell you, there’s a finite reach when you build a toy for specifically for the early adopter crowd.

Don’t get me wrong – the world needs early adopters. They’re the ones outing the newest, the latest and greatest. They’re the ones eating, sleeping, breathing, and dreaming whatever the latest addiction is. They’re the ones pushing things forward.

But are they…me? I don’t know.

So, for now, I’m just giving three cheers for moderate participation, taking breathers, and having a life…now get on over to FriendFeed and discuss.