Procrastination across the Facebook nation and cyber-hoarding
Is it just me or is your day in the office increasingly distracted by the myriad of “networking sites”? I realised yesterday that, if i want to, i can spend an entire day interacting with people entirely over the internet.
Facebook is my biggest weakness- a quick message to someone becomes a day of responding to messages, notifications, individuals asking me questions, playing scrabble games and reading other people’s profiles!
I received an email reminder from LinkedIn, a professional networking site (which was originally sold to me by offering “employment opportunities”). Yet on top of notifications regarding the social life of my friends, I don’t care.
This blog is being interrupted by an MSN messaging flashing at me menacingly and uh oh…. now there’s a chat in Skype too!
The telephone goes. It could be someone calling from the UK, from Chile, a message on Skype being passed to me through a computer, a message waiting on our landline, an SMS message being translated to “english” over the telephone or an email being translated. I hesitate and miss it but i fear it will only return to me in another form later today!
I feel like a London commuter sometimes- emerging from underground, mobile phones sing a co-ordinated chorus telling passengers that the world has moved on while they’ve been on the train. Except that i’m not the train and i’m not unwittingly out of range. I’m voluntarily out of range!
Perhaps I should simplify my life? Cut the phone links, drop my email address, focus on Skype and Facebook? Maybe if I leave the old forms they’ll just shrink into insignificance, shrivel up and die (in some computer harddisk sort of way).
But no… the old technology doesn’t stop bothering me because i stop bothering it. Mr Gates is way too clever for that! A pop-up reminds me that i’m tardy and slow to update my version of MSN and at the bottom of Skype, it tells me that i’m out of date and could be enjoying higher quality Skype calling! How much better can it really get? Am I really that old? I’m cyber-hoarding and I know it. Yet I can’t face hitting the uninstall button for fear of losing those essential contacts, made over 10 years!
What is mildly frightening is that i don’t work! How do you manage it?
Must go. Another pop-up is distracting me!