chrishansenhome

Well, I think that I will need to again take some time off from Facebook and Twitter. As amusing as they can sometimes be, and as good as they are with keeping up with people, they are an enormous time suck. I don't understand how people with jobs actually keep up with them. I certainly don't understand how students, who must study, write papers, go to school, and do all the other things that students do, can keep up with not only FB and Twitter but Instagram, Snapchat, etc. etc. and so on and so forth.

In February, Facebook-Free February kept me away from Facebook, mostly. However, HWMBO being away, I fell ill with the flu (we believe) and that was an even worse suck than Facebook et al. So I had little or no ambition and just sat around. That didn't get anything done.

So I'm going to take June and July off from the same apps: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, and YouTube. I will then force myself to tidy up things and ensure that I have space to function without becoming the third Collier brother.
I'm not going yet, but I'll be gone on June 1st and you won't see me until August 1st. So, if your birthday falls in that time, Happy Birthday! Many happy returns of the day! in advance. And if you need to get in touch, email me. If you don't know my email, be patient. August 1st will only be 61 days away.

And, I stress, there is nothing wrong with your television set, or with me. I desperately need to pay attention to our home and our environment. If I don't, we'll be drowning in things. And I'm hoping desperately that I won't get ill again and waste the entire time I'm away. T-16 days and counting.

Well, I've not logged in to Facebook or Twitter for 5 days (I think—could be 6 or 4. Time flies when you're having fun!) After the first full day, when I cleaned up one bookcase shelf, I was very lazy, and didn't do any more until this afternoon. No pictures yet, mainly because there are things I've found that will need to be put somewhere else, and they are at the front of the bookshelf. Thus, it still looks untidy.

However, on the plus side, I threw away 5 years of meeting notes and the like, and have cleaned up one Billy-IKEA bookcase shelf as well as one large bookshelf.

But, you ask, how do I feel about not seeing my Facebook friends, or tweets? I feel fine. I don't miss them (or you, if you happen to be one of those I've friended on Facebook). This is not a bad thing, really.

The definition of a time-suck (to me) is something you feel compelled to do but in fact do not have to do—and this something takes up time during which you could do other much more useful things. I do not say that the statuses of friends, or their tweets, are not interesting, or valuable. I do say that they are not necessary to me at the moment. Tidying up my study and my living room are critical.

I am hopeful that everything I need to do will be done by the time the month is over. If not, I'm minded to extend the blackout until it is.

One thing I haven't gotten to grips with is books. I do need to be rid of some books, but I have not yet had the gumption to actually separate those I can do without. In my defense, I think that there are so many things in front of books that it's hard for me to be able to choose which ones should go. I am minded to discard all or almost all my computer books, as nearly all of them are obsolete.

So, I continue. I will post another picture when I've gotten a bit further on.

As many of you know, I've been out of work for 2-1/2 years now. Luckily, due to the generosity, forbearance, and tolerance of HWMBO, I have continued to be fed, watered, housed, and loved over this amount of time. However, during that time my online involvement has become more and more of a distraction.

Consider. Most days I get up at 7, make breakfast for HWMBO and me for 7:45 am, and then see him off to work around 8:30am. I then start looking at email, which takes an inordinate amount of time most days. Even evaluating an email and almost instantly deleting it takes time. Around 10 or so I start reading Live Journal blogs, and when I've caught up with them I read Facebook. This takes me through to lunch. I haven't included IMing with various friends here and far away. I often do this while I'm reading other things.

In the afternoon, I'll continue to catch up with arriving emails, do some memorisation for my Masonic duties, have a coffee break, and then go to the supermarket to shop for dinner.

I cook, then wait for HWMBO to return from work. We have dinner, then I return to the computer and catch up with everything until bedtime. Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

There are occasional changes to this routine—I go shopping further afield for various things, or go out to sit in a park somewhere and be with people, or have a coffee at a coffee shop rather than in my kitchen. However, my routine doesn't vary much at all. I have a large number of New Scientist magazines and Church Times newspapers which are waiting to be read. I get a new one each week, add it to the bottom of the pile, and try to read some of the one on top. I have books that I want to read. In fact, I would even like to WRITE one eventually. But this routine of mine conspires to frustrate any interactions other than online ones and any activities other than reading tweets, FB statuses, and blog entries.

So I've decided that I have to pare down my online activities to as much as I can do in two hours in the morning. This will involve:

• Removing one of my Twitter accounts, only leaving the one devoted to professional activities;
• Filtering my Facebook feed to remove some people and feeds out of which I don't get a lot of food for thought;
• Paring down the blogs I read with a filter so that I only see things that I know will interest me from people who I like.

I will try not to unfriend anyone, but use filters intelligently so that I can dip into items that I haven't read when I have some time.

This whole situation, of course, is not unique to me. I've had three Facebook friends disappear from FB in the last month or so. Other Live Journal friends disappear from blogging for months or even years at a time. I have generally neglected Twitter in the past couple of months and don't believe I'll lose a lot by just disappearing from there for a while.

I will Tweet once a day for the next several days just to alert people that I shall be disappearing from there and referring them to this blog entry. I won't be mentioning it on Facebook; I will just apply the filters so that what I read is cut down to a manageable size. And my filter on Live Journal will take away items that I just look at occasionally and pass by. Real bloggers and interesting people will still be in my filter and get read and comments filed.

All this brings into question the concept of "friend" as it relates to our online presences. I think that this concept was first attached to blogging. The idea was that no one in their right mind would be interested in reading a blog from someone whom they did not know personally, so obviously someone who follows your blog would be a real friend.

Of course, the first bloggers didn't realise that a blog, besides its value in telling your real friends what you thought and what you were up to, would also be a vehicle for writing essays about life, the universe, and everything. The blog thus became a literary device, and people whom you had never met would want to read your blogs. Other blogs became compendia of news stories or opinions on certain specific topics, and the personal aspect of a blog was lost in favour of an impersonal voice broadcasting to anyone who wanted to listen.

Then Facebook and Twitter, among other social media sites, appropriated the word "friend" to mean "this person who wants to keep up with what I'm saying but whom I may never have met". Now I have hundreds of online friends around the world, few of whom I've ever met, but all of whom Facebook, Twitter, and Live Journal call my "friends".

Sometimes these days I have to qualify the word "friend" as "meatspace friend" as that is the best way to define what a real-life friend is without devaluing the relationships I have with people online.

As to what I'll be doing instead of Tweeting and posting statuses in Facebook, who knows? Perhaps the time is ripe to write that book I've been thinking about.

Over and (partially) out!

This morning the UK-Twitterverse was asking for tweets praising our contact with/experience of the NHS and hash them under the title #WeLoveTheNHS. So, I tweeted thusly:

I had a heart attack & got angioplasty & a stent within an hour. I'm originally from US but the NHS is (a good reason) I stay in (the) UK #welovethe NHS

(Note: This happened in 2006, 3-1/2 years ago).

Now, my Facebook page picks up all my tweets. From a friend (a real meat-life friend, not just an Internet friend), I got this Facebook response:

You just shocked me, Chris H! I thought you'd had a heart attack *today* (and a miraculous recovery and reappearance on the internets).

A bit later another friend (real meat-life friend again) said that he thought the same thing.

This is a case of "context-slip", in that the context I originally tweeted to did not exist in Facebook, where the tweet was replicated.

What to do? As a soc.motsseur always says, "Context, context, context". However, there is no good way to provide the context here.

Has anyone else had this problem with messages to one social network replicated without context on another?

Enquiring minds want to know!