Social Media: Is it Good?

My gut reaction to the explosion of social media like Twitter and Facebook is that they waste time.

Is that true? Certainly it seems like people are displacing old activities in order to spend more time interacting online.

If the displaced activity is watching TV or playing a non-social video game, I guess the interaction FB and Twitter provide is far superior.

But is the base premise even correct? Are people doing less "worthwhile" stuff because of excess connectivity?

Who's to judge what's worthwhile? Humans are inherently social creatures and being social is something that brings most of us happiness simply because of our biology. Thus social interactions, even mediated online, are enjoyable. And we should seek out enjoyment when we can in this life, I believe. It could be in some cases people might forgo actual physical interaction in order to stay home and post to their social media site.

I find it works the opposite; social media sites improve my ability to interact with a wider group of people when I see them in the flesh, if for no other reason than I have already forged a connection with them that is current. I know what they've been up to lately, they know them same with me. We have common points of reference.

Of course, "worthwhile" could be defined as doing your job in a timely manner. Do people who routinely check Facebook do worse in their jobs or more frequently miss deadlines? We require an actual evidence gathering mission with a large sample size rather than anecdotes here. All I can say is that I enjoy checking my social sites a few times a day WITHOUT it becoming an obstacle toward getting my daily work completed.

This does require some mental discipline, I won't lie. But lots of temptations to not do work require mental discipline to a greater or lesser degree, and we've figured out how to manage them--shouldn't be too much harder to figure this one out.

Or so say I.

Blog Commenting Experiment

To maintain the sliver of geek cred I may have once been able to lay claim to, I am going to try to add Facebook Connect to my blog so people can comment on the many and varied stories I post here [/sarcasm] using their Facebook identities, instead of having to come up with some other commenting identity.

The theory is that a lot more people use Facebook than Open ID, or who are on Blogger. If you have a Facebook account, stop by in comments and say hi as part of the experiment if you have the time :-).

When you click on comments, one of your choices will be Facebook Connect; click on that and leave your comment. Actually, I'm probably going to try it out myself since I'm here already, but I'd love to see if it works for other folks too!

UPDATE: Well, the critical linch pin for this integration is a commenting technology called Disqus. Apparently they are doing maintenance at the moment, so I may not get the first comment after all.

Realms at Indy

So, I guess by now it's become fairly clear I had the Realms on the brain for this Gen Con. I was gratified on one hand to see that the new FRCG sold out of our booth... but in the first hour of a 4 day event? Well, we ordered more... which sold out. And a third time, which we split up to sell some on Saturday and the rest on Sunday. Sold out both of these final lots, too. Awesome from one point of view, but that means a lot of people at Gen Con who wanted to buy a copy there weren't able to do so. Drat!

Anyhow, on Sunday, GamerZero interviewed me about how my seminar went, and about the Forgotten Realms in General. Take a look:

Tension between Tweet and Blog

It used to be that pressure would build , the pressure to write something on my blog. For a while, I posted every day, if you remember. But now with Twitter in my life, I find it much easier to microblog an interesting thought there... and my poor blog loses out.

And then there's my recent presence on Facebook! That whole ecosystem of community can suck up all your time.

Add that to the fact that I just revived my Wizards Staff Blog.

Wizards blog, Facebook and Twitter together means... hardly any blogging here.

But hardly any doesn't mean none!

Sometimes a person's got to talk computers, politics, martial arts, environment... whatever. And spend more than 140 characters to do so. This'll remain the place for that.