Social media is like TV

You think you had problems with your productivity when you were watching too much TV? Here’s a bigger problem – today we’re spending too much time at social media sites.

So here’s me, a modern girl, somewhat “geeky” and creative. I have been a technology enthusiast since I was 5, I’m using all sorts of web apps, and along with that have a creative job, combining languages and the web technology. I try to have my creative hobbies too. Like photography, mostly digital.

It all sounds pretty and nice, huh? But guess what: it’s not. I found myself spending loads of time at social media websites browsing through information streams. In the last few weeks, my personal favorite has been Twitter. That’s where I found interesting links and stories.

Twitter had long been just the next new thing my geeky boyfriend was trying out. Until I signed in… Then it became my primary information source. I started following cool web people sharing design and tech-related stories. And all of them were so interesting! And I wanted to bookmark and favorite them all, and share them all… But guess what: while following no more than 75 people, I often found myself scrolling and clicking and browsing through their links for hours… Especially when I didn’t have urgent work to do. It’s so much information that the brain can’t really cope with it, and in the same time it all streams real time, even more, and more, and more…

Last week I spent some time at my mother’s place. She is not the typical mother, you know. Yes, she doesn’t go online too often, and she doesn’t read newspapers. But she does watch TV. In her little kitchen-dining room, the TV is the first thing to switch on and the only thing to look at while having dinner. She checks out the news, but since she knows the viewpoints vary, she follows all the three national TV news reports, as well as one economic channel. This can last up to 2 hours. She sees the same stories two or three times, sometimes even the same report (when it was from a small village with only one reporter available). Then she waits to see what they are broadcasting next. If she doesn’t like it, she’d scroll through all the 50 channels three or four times, and even if she finds nothing interesting, she would just stick with some story. And the hours would go by… Then it’s time for bed, and it’s got too late… Not because of a particularly interesting TV show or interview, but just because of the TV itself, she goes to bed tired and late, having done almost nothing else than staring at the TV screen.

It’s not the information itself that is the biggest problem here. It’s even not the most boring piece of information. It’s what we do with it. In my mother’s case, and in mine: not much. Or to be precise: Nothing. Here, I said it. I find interesting and useful tips every day, and I make nothing out of them. I consume the information only passively, and don’t use it actively.

It’s even worse than receiving no information at all. If you’re not a passive consumer, at some point you’d get creative. Or at least active. You’d not read “Top 10 ways to kill bad habits” and then bookmark it and then forget about it—you’d really try to kill your bad habits. Interesting enough, if we sit and think about our problems, we’d easily come up with some solution. But while we’re just passively reading about people’s best practices, we’d still be stuck with our own problems.

One another problem is: we are served information we don’t really need right now. But it is interesting and might one day be useful and valuable, so we fear we’d miss it. But guess what: the theory saying you could contact any person in the world through 6 or 7 people applies even more to online information streams. Someone wrote an interesting post about a particular problem in typography? Well guess what: until you really need some typography work done and face a problem with it, you don’t really need that article. And when you do face the problem, you’d just type your enquiry in the search field, and you’d probably find the solution at ease.

A problem is solved not through the fact that you’re having a brilliant idea; it’s more productive to have any idea—even not a brilliant one—but to try and incorporate it as soon as possible.

Because productivity comes from action. Being active is more productive than being passive. Not watching TV is more productive than watching too much TV. Not following the information streams is more productive than following them all and end up doing nothing. It’s as simple as that.

filed under: point of view