Connectivity

 Who's the Boss, You or Your Gadget"  is available at http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/06/business/06limits.html?_r=2&smid=tw-nytimes which describes the relationship people have with technology - "smart phones, text messaging, video calling and social media."

Although being connected 24/7 allows us to engage in our friendships/relationships through constant conversation and access news as fast as we can type, but are people losing the ability to be in the moment? Psychologists argue that separating the parts of your life are key in reducing stress and anxiety.  How much are we losing if we are not able to be in the moment because we are too busy updating Facebook or reading where our friends have just checked-in?

I saw a preview for a new reality show on the Lifetime Network entitled One Born Every Minute.  This program is set in a hospital and shows the joys and trials of about-to-be-parents and the staff is the process of giving birth. The clip showed a woman updating her Facebook status about the progress of her labor.  This made me think about my friends and their time in the delivery room. I have seen several mobile updates to Facebook during my friends’ time in the hospital.  The photos are being uploaded by the fathers and/or friends.  Having spent many hours in the hospital for my niece’s birth, I do understand the abundance of downtime.  However, this was a time before mobile uploads and I managed to find things to occupy my time - such as be with my sister and keep my family company. I did not have my nose in my phone.  Maybe I would have behaved the same way as the characters on the show if I had mobile upload abilities to Facebook.

This need to constantly update our Facebook has become an extension of our identity and a medium to promote that identity.  It is fascinating because not everyone I know behaves in this minute by minute update phenomenon.  Some of my friends do not even have smart phones and simply do not have access to the mobile uploading technology.  Do those with smart phones have different identities than those with smart phones? Social media provides a novel outlet for self-promotion which can be an effective tool.  Could this be another outlet for narcissists to participate?  Every post or update is a form of self-promotion.  Rather than insisting that post-ers or update-ers are narcissists, we should look at the individual’s content and frequency.  

The following quote is from a blog called Self-Promotion 2.0 – Promote Yourself without Looking Self-Promotional http://remarkablogger.com/2009/04/06/self-promotion-20-promote-yourself-without-looking-self-promotional/.  I thought it was a nice addition to my blog topic.

"What is self-promotion?

Imagine you’re at a party, and you meet the guy who only wants to talk about himself. You know, that guy. Everything is about him. I bet that’s what you think of when you think about self-promotion: smarmy, selfish tactics that turn people off because they they bring no value.
On blogs, this kind of self-promotion arrives in the form of comment spam.  The kind of comments I hate the most are not the automated ones, but the ones where someone actually put in some time and effort to say something, except they didn’t say anything truly valuable or worthwhile. They just wanted to drop a link. For the time spent, they could have achieved something much more.
On social media, this kind of self-promotion results in one-sided posts that promote only one thing: the person sending the message. These posts (tweets/stumbles/diggs/reddits/whatevers) only contain links to the person’s own sites, contain a large amount of affiliate links, and are often nothing but a sales message. None of this is considered terribly valuable by most people."