Stop pushing!

This week has seen a flurry of activity with social networking tools. On the whole, it's been fun playing around as a break from reading earnest scholarly articles, but at the same time I've found myself going round in increasingly self-referential circles.

Blogger X writes a new post & announces it on Twitter, where his followers re-tweet it. He also posts about it on Facebook, where it is shared by his many friends. Subscribers to his RSS feed are notified about the new post via their feed reader. If I was active on Google+ I would no doubt find it there too, & mutual acquaintances may well have added it to their social bookmarking site, which in turn would be notified to me......

By the time I've read about this post in half a dozen locations, the one thing I haven't done is actually read what he has written. The proliferation of tools can be counter-productive:  I find myself becoming hostile, muttering 'Yeah, yeah - you already said'.

I suppose the solution is to be more selective about how I use the tools. Perhaps I should only follow/subscribe to/befriend people in one place, to avoid duplication. I've already turned off most email notifications.

There was a lot of talk in the early days of the web about 'information overload'. Perhaps this is the web 2.0 equivalent. I'm starting to feel more sympathetic to my opting-out students!

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