"Dear John" to the Social Web
Dear Social Web,
There was a time you had an extreme appeal to me. No longer.
I considered myself among the infatuated pioneers of your initial discovery, further invention, recurrent usage and constant promotion.
Yes, even before the term came to terms: I was first among university students to get terminal access to UNIX messaging, first among consumers of Usenet and BBS, first to get a Compuserve account, an AOL membership (before there was web), first to send docs to family using PC-to-PC modem (before email), among the first to open a SixDegrees account, followed by others at LiveJournal, Friendster, Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Posterous, etc.
I was always hassling to get the all-elusive invites to the newest social flavor du jour (Even to networks that went nowhere! Pownce, FriendFeed, Plurk and Google Wave come to mind).
I increasingly devoted my time to checking-in at Foursquare, Gowalla, Brightcove, Whrll, Yelp, now even Facebook. I adopted tools for multiple posting to handle the smorgasbord of channels for "self-expression" (and redundant/duplicate content I might add).
I constantly gardened my online presence. Making sure "dahveedgr" was synonymous with my meatspace persona (check most social networks/products: I will own that user name). Heck, I even own http://dahveed.gr!... My sons each (one with barely a few months) had a website already.
This reached the point of madness, or at least not-entirely-healthy addiction (Although I believe such not to be constrained to a personal malady, but rather societal in my demographic).
Then, suddenly, I realized of a few things:
- I am no longer pioneering a promise. I am simply adding to the data cloud. I am not that special to you, Social Web. I am just another input device of aggregated "sentiment analysis" for corporations. Ripe for being data mined. I know this because I build and feed such tools. The aforementioned cloud is infested with every teenager from the Jersey Shore, every Hollywood celebrity, every corporate marketeer. Everyone is a social web pundit, everyone is a media maven. I have created a monster! (both me and the platform).
- Nobody really cares as much as we think they care. They are busy microblogging their own life. This is not a bitter observation, rather an emotionless objective realization: At this point, we are just adding marketing data at best, social noise at worst.
- I always told myself: "I am not doing this for others as a narcissistic exercise, I am doing it for me!"... To remember and document my thoughts and feelings about movies, restaurants, experiences. Highlighting and bookmarking every given moment of my own timeline. A hybrid public/personal diary of shorts. Now I realize that it is indeed a blessing to be able to forget. The past can be baggage that obstructs the present and compromises the future.
- I further justified it: "I am doing it for my kids!"... When they want to learn about their dad, they will have a fully documented and organized life. Now that I lost my dearly loved dad, I realize how overwhelming the richness of his life is. Just curating through his creative production can overshadow my own life obligations and inventions. I doubt my kids will have the time to care that much about my "legacy"... In fact, I doubt they will have time to parse through their own crazily documented life! Dozens of pictures and videos each day of their childhood will be undoubtedly hard to digest in their own mediated adulthood.
So dear social network friends... No more accounts for me. No more interruption media, alerts and notifications. I am going OFF THE GRID (almost). I know I may have been the cause of you joining the Bit race (I forgot how many family members and close friends I converted to the "social network revolution"). This shall teach you not to listen to me, or perhaps, to continue doing so... These are after all cycles of reinvention! I am just going through my latest.
Starting today, I will freeze and wall-off my personal websites, Facebook, Twitter, Yelp, Posterous, Shelfari, iLike, Vimeo, TripIt, Bloglines, Delicious, FriendFeed, Upcoming, Dopplr, Last.fm, Digg, Pandora, Diigo, Tumblr, Yahoo Pulse, Plaxo, Google Reader, AIM, YouTube, Blip.tv, Friendster, Posterous, MySpace, Spurl, drop.io, Google Buzz, Windows Live, Get Satisfaction, Flixter, IMDB, Intense Debate, Apple Ping, Box.net, Magnolia, TripAdvisor, Instapaper, Netflix Reviews, claimID, OpenID, Amazon Reviews, Evernote, CNN profile, New York Times Select, StumbleUpon, Good.is, Issuu, Scribd, ShareThis, Amazon ReadingList, SlideShare, Blip.FM, GetGlue, Yammer, etc. etc, etc.
I will be gradually shutting-off sites until a complete transition on October 10th (10/10/10). It does take a surprising amount of time to clean-up and undo years of building up self-promotion!
I expect a moment where a search for my name in Google will not provide 9 pages of personal information as it literally does now (all a self-inflicted murdering of privacy I might concede).
I will only maintain three sites:
Personal
An increasingly editorialized and edited-down
http://www.flickr.com/people/dahveedgr... (Future redirect for http://gomez-rosado.com and http://dahveed.gr) Because I like photography and I think images are still the best way to document life for those very few that truly care (my mother, actually). I no longer have to prove much to anybody else. Any professional portfolio that I have, I will port there. Eventually.
Family
Geni.com. It is a closed system for family members only anyway. And allows me to purely maintain my genealogy. Not much to see there for most of you.
Professional
http://www.linkedin.com/in/dahveedgr ... For the moment, I shall maintain this account for true networking (The only site where the word "network" actually means what it says). It may come to a moment where I may not even require it though. Those that follow my scarce UX-oriented tweets, can simply head to http://twitter.com/wantmag... Where I will anonymously contribute worthwhile links in a recurrent basis. (Of course I will continue adding content to http://wantmag.com, http://wanted.wantmag.com and all related sites).
No more chat accounts (Good bye AIM, iChat, Google Talk, Yahoo Messenger, MSN Messenger... Skype only on a need-to-use basis) No more check-ins. No more "liking" your posts (sorry). No more commenting, rating, starring, tagging. No more activity or life streams. I am going anti-social (or at least anti-websocial).
The benefits of my drastic "data diet"?
- More time for my sons.
- Inner peace! Less noise in my noggin = More signal in my synapses
- More time to concentrate on "content quality" rather than "commentary quantity"... Which interestingly enough, I hope will contribute on my concentration to architect the NEXT generation of social web experiences. With increased focus on building one-to-one relationships in lieu of one-to-many, and where <em>meaningful</em> replaces <em>mindless</em> as the imperative descriptive adjective.
See ya in person someday. It's been (un)real
_dahveed
