I've been a bit put out with social media, as you may have noticed. I was engulfed by the tech chatter in my life, and social media was an easy scapegoat.
I suspected many of us feel buried under an avalanche of technology, and there is proof. Last year some very smart folks at Cambridge University reported that 1 in 3 people (or at least British people) feel overwhelmed by communications technology (click here). Researchers did not specify whether respondents were overwhelmed by communications about Pippa Middleton.
Anyway, this statistic makes me feel much better. I'm not the only one going nutty with all this digital noise. I'm not the only one who isn't up-to-the-minute in the cyber news cycle (see above for reference to year-old scientific study). I'm not an anomaly, I'm in good company.
So back to social media: In the early days of this blog, I famously (ha!) deleted my Twitter account. I wasn't even using it, but its mere existence was stressing me out. Every time I saw a hashtag, I felt I should be tweeting something, anything, lest I become irrelevant. But since many big companies don't know what to do with social media (so says the "Harvard Business Review" in this article -- recently, I should add), I shouldn't take it out on Twitter. We're all new to this. And it ain't the little blue bird's fault.
