How to Save Yourself from the Social Web

So when is too much social web a bad thing? I struggle sometimes in balancing my virtuals against my actuals, and find that many nonprofits I work with struggle to determine this same balance.

This year I attended a small conference where I met a recent college graduate. Actually, before I "met" him, I was sitting next to him in a workshop and happened to glance for a moment at his laptop screen. As the speaker spoke, I was listening, taking some notes, and fending off a few distractions in my email, feeds and my neighbors screen. My neighbor was fully immersed in online distractions - I glimpsed him tweeting away using a Firefox Twitter client, two IM conversations (in Facebook, and Skype), an email half in progress and a half written answer to a question on LinkedIn. Okay, it was more than a glance I stole...

Continuing not to mind my own business, I introduced myself, and asked him what he thought of the workshop so far. He said he had not "heard anything interesting" yet. He had, however, found it interesting enough to announce to his social network that he was in this workshop. I settled back in my chair, wondering if he had any mental cycles available to recognize anything useful the speaker might say. Of course by this point, I had also missed the last several minutes of the workshop.

The Center for Internet Addiction and Recovery describes "information overload" as one kind of addiction where "Individuals will spend greater amounts of time searching and collecting data from the web and organizing information," leading to obsessive compulsive tendencies and reduced work productivity. In a large scale epidemiological study on Internet addiction, Standford found that about 8% of participants used the Internet as a "way to escape problems or relieve negative mood". While on one hand, a major part of my work is to help nonprofits spend greater amounts of time organizing information, I also find myself regularly talking nonprofits out of many tools that add more organization, but also more disarray.

In thinking about this problem, I pulled from my social sciences training to develop this revolutionary Theory of Organizational Disarray (TOD), which can be simply illustrated with the following chart (drawn here in charcoal pencil on recycled printer paper).

Organizations who are phobic of all things technology can indeed dramatically increase order in their work by adopting strong technologies. There is a "Zone of Pragmatism" that we should ideally strive for, where technology is a practical tool for getting things done effectively, one of many such tools. Luddite organizations do not have to move very far to find the Zone. However, we begin to slide back from optimal levels the more we adopt tools, and the more we begin to love technology for technologies sake. In fact, you become worse off eventually with more tools, than you would have been before there ever were Internets as networks become increasingly shallow and fragmented. Implicit here is a correlation between loving technology and using more social networking tools - I am working on a new graph for this.

So it makes sense then that a software tool exists for helping you kick the social networking habit? Indeed there are. One such tool is Freedom. Developed for us Mac users (probably among the majority of social network addicts) for disconnecting you from the network, allowing you to focus on other meaningful pursuits, such as nutrition, exercise and physically seeing one another. Once you start it, you are no longer able to tweet, IM, email, or other virtual engagements without rebooting. I would rather see a social networking solution to this problem, maybe some tool that harnesses the collective shame power of my network by measuring how much folks care about what I write on a tweet-by-post basis and begins to color my computer screen increasing shades of embarrassment red.

What strategies have you employed to balance your social networking activities?