There’s been a lot of talk over the last few months about cutting back on the amount of time we spend in online social networks — or even disengaging from them completely. Tech blogs like Lifehacker.com and even The Consumerist have posted detailed instructions for deleting one’s Facebook account (a harder thing to do than one might assume). Meanwhile, columnists have openly wondered about the point of Foursquare or, like TechCrunch's Paul Carr, crowed about deleting their Twitter and other feeds.
The argument's a valid one, of course, and a conversation worth having. A lot of us do spend an eyebrow-raising amount of time online, much of it “interacting” with people we could see face to face within 15 minutes of going outside and getting into the car. (My wife spends so much time on Facebook that, when my buddy’s parents started their own accounts, they assumed she worked there.)
We’ve developed habits.
This article appears in Sep 2-8, 2010.