There are only 24 hours, or 1440 minutes or-if you’d rather-86, 400 seconds, in a day. Time is a valuable resource in today’s hectic society.
In the days gone by, one might have come home from work, read the paper, ate, sat out on the porch and visited with the neighbors. The days may have seemed long, and time, slow. Now people can work from home and check Facebook during the game, the movie or the date. The quiet moments only come when we disconnect ourselves from our devices. Finding a balance between the immediacy of social media and immediacy of the physical presence of significant others in our lives is a constant struggle.
I’m a people person; I like to connect; I like to stay in touch. Like the AT & T commercial used to say, I also like to “reach out and touch someone”, but sometimes with my hands instead of my phone. However across time and space, sometimes a digital connection is sufficient. As the quote goes, “LinkedIn is for people you know. Facebook is for people you used to know. Twitter is for people you want to know.”
A friend of mine is a NYT best-selling author who has built a large fan base through social media. One day while sitting on the couch next to her young daughter, she was answering her e-mail, checking her Facebook page and tweeting. Her daughter said that she wished she had a Facebook page so that she could follow her mother. There’s a lot of maternal guilt that can follow a statement like that. There is only so much one person has time for.
Like Drew Barrymore’s character expresses in He’s Not That Into You, the social media landscape can be exhausting. I felt that I was reasonably active in social media, and then I started doing social media for my work. My enthusiasm for my personal use waned, and my time outside of work became more focused on the people in my circle of concern and less about the people in my circle of acquaintance. My priorities shifted, and yet my search for balance between my real life and my virtual life continues.
While social media can be a diversion that distracts from the Now, social media can also be dynamic, exhilarating and engaging. Social media affords an opportunity to participate in a larger community, to create information and expression, to curate and aggregate this information, and to immerse ourselves in virtual and real worlds. Because we believe it has value, we give social media use priority; we experiment with it and in it; we make time for it in our lives.
Gretchen Zaitzeff
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