CheckMate

This is an old discussion, but I’ve never seen anybody nail it any better than this guy has…

Larry Dignan at ZDNet asks, “Do you have to be in every conversation?” Well, I most emphatically say “No.”

No question technology has its uses. For example, you’re reading this online, on a computer or maybe a smartphone. You may have just “stumbled upon” this blog via something like Digg or StumbleUpon, or as the result of a search. Or - I hope - you’re signed up to my RSS feed and are a regular reader, which means you’re using Google Reader or Bloglines or any of a number of other ways to look at RSS feeds. And, of course, I’m writing this on a computer, posting it on a website, and using Wordpress to do it.

Throw on top of that that all of what we’re talking about can pretty much now be done from anywhere, 24/7/365. Which, for the most part, is a tremendous thing.

But, that said, it’s very easy to become completely overwhelmed by technology, especially the specific type of “keep current” stuff that Larry is talking about - in fact, it’s worse now than it’s ever been. Services like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, FriendFeed, etc., all of which have an “instant update”, real-time quality, are very easy to become sucked into. While some of those services are very useful, I still remain unconvinced about some of the others, and the trade off (and, yes, there is a trade off - there always is) hasn’t been worth it to me so far.

Larry asks some specific questions - you should look at every one of them, and ask yourself the same questions (and likely a few more):

• When do you have a conversation for real?
• When do you play with your kids?
• Is everyone so busy Twittering and tracking 140 character ramblings that you forget it’s sunny outside?
• If you boiled down the comments on all of these services how many are truly valuable?
• What exactly are we striving to keep up with?
• What’s wrong with the sound of silence?
• What’s the threshold between “neat service” and “waste of my time?”
• Would a better filter be to just decline the latest newfangled Web 2.0 service and be a lackadaisical follower?

This isn’t some holier-than-thou lecture from me, I’d be the last guy to suggest you just get rid of technology altogether (although there are days…), and you may have a totally different response to using some of those services than mine.

But, whatever you do, you really have to ask yourself - just how useful is something to you, and what price do you pay for that usefulness?

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