Epic Default Productions

I was catching up on my magazine reading the other day, when I came across an interesting article in WIRED. It was basically about rules that men should follow.

The one that really stuck out to me, and not because of the giant pyramid graphic is was displayed on, was about how much time you should spend on different forms of communications. Like how you should spend nine hours a week watching television, but only one hour a week on twitter. I don’t remember if those are the exact counts, but that doesn’t really matter anyway.

The reason is I was really interested in the article was that it pointed out how vast our forms of communication have become. When I was younger, if I wanted to get a hold of one of my friends, I had only one option. Call them up on their home phone and talk to them.  The next paragraph is all the possible ways I have to get in touch with them now.

I could still call them on the home phone, or cell, or text message, e-mail, Google Voice, Skype, AIM, Google Chat, Yahoo Chat, Myspace, Facebook Chat & Wall, Twitter, IRC, Forums, Xbox Live, Playstation Network, Farmtown, Secondlife, WoW, Xfire and Steam pop into my head within the first 30 seconds.

Why? Because there are people that I have communicated with using only one of those forms of communication.  And some of my friends, even my family, I can communicate with on multiple of those channels. But is that really a good thing? What have all of these forms of communication gotten us?

For me, personally, a lot of headaches. I’ve always been one to hate missing something. Whenever I slept over or went on trips with friends, I never really slept because I always thought that the one time that I crash early, I’ll miss some once-in-a-lifetime event that everybody would talk about for years to come.

Now, in a real world social interaction, it’s easy to not miss something. All you have to do is be sober and awake. In the virtual world it’s a whole different story. My twitter front page at its worst, is still just 21 minutes old.  And stack that on top of Facebook and IRC and there’s always something going on.

But what I’ve found out from those times hanging out, or browsing all of the online feeds, is that a lot if it is for nothing.  I’ve pulled plenty of all-nights waiting for something special, with nothing to show for it. 99% of the time is wasted for that 1 thing that is actually interesting.

So in closing, what I am trying to get at with this rant is the fact that I really can’t handle the constant social news that is always coming at me. I just want people to not talk about everything on every form of communication we have and go back to just chatting about it when I call you up.