First of all, do we still talk about “memes,” or is that something else on which I am hopelessly behind? If we do, here’s a meme I’m seeing among some of my Twitter folks: an Internet fast for the holidays. Three of my colleagues have mentioned it, and two have cited spousal annoyance as a reason. That caught my attention, as I’m getting some heat at home for being buried in the BlackBerry or constantly staring at my laptop. Telling The Mrs. to follow me on FriendFeed did not elicit a positive response.
I’ve felt a bit overwhelmed by all my connecting methods lately. Ever since accepting the position of social media manager at SAS I’ve felt I needed to beef up my online presence. I started blogging in 2003 but I haven’t blogged about work until I started this blog, and that makes me feel at a disadvantage. At least once a day on the blogs or Twitter feeds of the social media gurus I follow I hear about something that I’m either not doing or not doing to its full potential. Steve Rubel is the worst “or best, I suppose”. I’m convinced he makes his morning toast on his iPhone, via Gmail. I was awake at midnight Saturday, in bed with my laptop, with a vague feeling I needed to be doing something with my Facebook profile, or checking in on the groups I’m following but not, you know, following. And then there’s my LinkedIn profile, and should I be using TweetDeck, and do I have Twitter alerts set up and what was the tool that Jim Tobin mentioned last week that made his BlackBerry beep whenever someone mentioned him on Facebook? Or was it Twitter? And do I even need that?
So the idea of an Internet fast sounds appealing, and also terrifying. Does that mean I’ve let social media become the equivalent of a dozen new inboxes that need to be dealt with? And if I go cold turkey “heh” on the Web this Thanksgiving, where am I going to look for stuffing recipes? A cookbook? What is this, 1952?
Have you condsidered an Internet fast? What would you miss the most?