On the Noise in Social Media

A lot of people say the Internet is a godsend for introverts and I think I have to say that I share similar opinion. What's interesting was, I had always thought that since the Internet allows us introverts to talk easier and considerably a lot more than what we usually do in person, that makes introverts become extroverts when online.

But I found out that that's not the case.

I read an interesting article from Psychology Today about introverts online. This is what the writer (who is an introvert) said: 

I blog, I tweet, I FB. I'm all over the place. But like in the offline world, I have my limits. 

By the end of a workday, FB voices start giving me the same kind of tiredhead I get at a party or after a stretch of face-to-face social engagements. Sometimes I find myself getting annoyed when people comment on my status lines, which is silly. If you're going to be an exhibitionist, you have to expect people to look.

An introvert offline is an introvert online. I don't accept friend requests from everyone on FB (so please don't friend me--though feel free to join me onTwitter ). I take a while to warm to new virtual friends. I hide people who bore me. Sometimes I want Twitter to just shut the hell up. And I prefer not to post on my blogs unless I have something to say. 

So, introvert offline, is introvert online. Nothing changes.

And that is pretty much what I'm feeling right now about the social media out there.

I'm never really into Facebook. I find it too crowded.  I mostly use it only to keep in touch with my close friends. Only close friends, yet, of course, it fails successfully. There are times I kind of lose myself and start typing anything I want to there, mostly unimportant things, and at the end of the day I mentally knock myself on the head, or simply wonder, what would be the best way to make use of this thing because what you've been doing is anything but useful, Self. I'm learning and will keep on learning for this one. 

Twitter, is another story. I rarely check my Twitter these days. For the past month, I only check my Twitter twice a week, and even that felt too much. I couldn't stay there for longer than 15 minutes, before the noise starts getting in to my nerve and I have this urge to immediately shut it down and runaway.

It's still addictive as usual. If I force myself to stay another click, most likely I'd stay there for another 15 - 20 minutes. There's always something interesting to see, inviting links to click, or simply curiosity over not-so-important-but-curiosity-is-curiosity things. 

I don't want to abandon Twitter because I realize that it's still an important source of information. I just need to find the way how to keep up with the (sometimes annoying) noise. 

What I did was I re-activate my Google Reader. It has been neglected for a couple of months because it's too crowded but I managed to trimmed it down to only subscription of blogs. No more news portals. I keep up with the latest news by following the news portals' on twitter, all grouped in my News column in TweetDeck.

In this case, TweetDeck is a lot of help. Whenever I feel I need to check on the news (or something else like the National Geography or Discovery Channel which I put in the "Interesting Stuff" column__yeah I know the name is far from creative), I can directly focus my attention to the relevant column. I don't have to be distracted by the noise in the timeline.

And honestly speaking, I rarely check my timeline lately. Well, there will always be interesting stuffs and information there but sometimes it's just too noisy, and really, most of the times, the information is not that important.  There is also the option of cleaning up my following list, which I've been planning to do actually. But it will take a certain amount of time and energy. Thinking of drowning into that noisy stream again alone has drained me. So in the mean time, I guess this would be the best way. 


Twitter for news updates, and Google Reader for my light readings.


And I'm a happy introvert :)




-7.20 pm, while trying to write something else, and as usual, I came up with something else-