You know, I used to love getting online, couldn't wait to catch up with my friends on Facebook every morning while I had my coffee...again at lunchtime...then during an afternoon break...in the evening while I wound down for the night... Now I have to force myself to go there. Oh, it isn't my friends, I still like to catch up with them! But it's no longer worth the effort. When I sign on I have to click all those little blue triangles to remove all the top stories. Then as I attempt to scroll down to see what's left, I am constantly interrupted by pinterest-like photos and posters - so many that there are more of those than of actual newsy posts by my friends! I hide them all, they irritate the heck out of me, if I wanted a half-dozen copies of each of a hundred cutesy sayings in graphic form cluttering up my wall, I'd have just joined pinterest! By that time I've caught up with the news from SOME of my friends - the ones that Facebook deems important enough for me to see easily - and I now have to go to my "Everyone" list that I had to make just so that I could see what's going on with everybody else. By the time I scan that (and since I can't hide the freakin' graphics on a list page I have to visually pick out the updates from the graphic flotsam and jetsam) and go back to my FB wall, there's a whole new crop of top stories and graphics junk littering the place! All that work leaves me no time to post my own updates or comment on others' updates, and I've wasted all of my FB time on just housekeeping. So most of the time, I don't even bother with FB anymore - once a day of frustration and wasted online time is more than enough for me, and I only endure it because I truly love the friends and family that I connect with there.
Meanwhile, Twitter remains neat and clean and simple. I scroll down a list and see what's new with my tweeps, comment on their posts, share my own updates, thank my new followers, post some personal notes, check the twitter pages of a few "favorite" tweeple, and I'm done in a matter of minutes, off to the next thing in my day. No muss, no fuss.
Since I've grown to dislike FB so much I've been spending more of my online time at YouTube. I have never seen before that there is a real community there, as I used to just go watch random videos. But I've discovered vlogs and, even though I only follow 3 of them, they are very satisfying to me. I've grown to care about these 3 people, pray for them, and someday may even learn to vlog myself! Again, what you see is what you get, the relationships forged there can be very satisfying (as the vloggers point out), and it's simple to get to what you want without a whole lot of junk getting in the way or wasting my time.
I have always enjoyed blogs. I subscribe to a whole heap of them on Google Reader. I rarely read blogs on the computer, but when I have down time (ie, falling asleep at night, in a waiting room at the doctor's, waiting for the final spin cycle to complete, whatever) I open my gReader app and catch up on a few. Oh, I'm never completely caught up, but always make sure I start with my favorites and work from there. (In ideal world I would only subscribe to my favorite blogs, but sometimes I click that RSS button when I get caught up in the excitement of the moment - lol.)
(Where does email fall into all of this? I check it first thing, every time I get online, do my replies or file away the info, and then move onto the rest. But I've left almost all of my yahoogroups - probably a year ago - and my email load has been reduced by about 90%, so it isn't as significant, time-wise.)
I can't, and don't want to, let my online time take over my life. During the busy seasons when I'm at my computer taking bug calls anyway, I spend a little more time doing social online things during business hours, between calls. The rest of the year I have many other things to do besides sit at my computer (as I did the last few years when I was too sick to live a "real" life most of the time); when I am here, my time has to count. Not be wasted by a bunch of useless housekeeping tasks, but really communicate and interact with other people, or research and learn, or be blessed or be a blessing. The internet is an adjunct to my "real life", not a replacement for it, and for me it's all about the people.
Friday, October 28, 2011
Thursday, October 27, 2011
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