Do You Have Social Media Fatigue?

Are you growing weary in keeping up with your blogs, Facebook and Tweets? I think the key to remember is that technology should help or improve our social and business lives. Blogs were created for an alternative viewpoint outside of the professional press or a place for niche interest communication. It this happening or are we all just reposting what everyone else is saying on his or her blogs? Facebook is supposed to improve or augment your social life, but has it replaced real life with a digital version? Twitter was designed for short spontaneous communication. But sites like Twitip have posted Tweet plans to use with a program that sends out prewritten Tweets “spontaneously” at regular intervals.

Another post talks about the practice of #followfriday. It started out as a good idea. You recommend your favorite Tweets, but in practice people mindlessly flooded long lists of Twitter usernames every Friday – turning a social media into a broadcast media. And NPR recently reported about teens using Twitter to organize flash mobs for illegal activities.

Are we all really meant to generate content? If  we all have blogs and we’re all trying to generate traffic to them, yet there is already too much out there how will that ever work? Maybe some consolidation needs to occur like in any industry when there are to many providers of a product or service. Maybe we need to take a lesson from old media and have fewer blogs but more unique contributors to those blogs. Remember newspapers? They attract or used to attract a large audience for dialing sharing of information, but they have a staff of writers responsible for generating that content.

The author of the blog The Nonist closed his blog after 5 years of publishing. From his experience he generated a satire of a disorder called Blog Depression. You can check it out at the link below if you wish. Here are two of his “facts.”

FACT: Meta-bloggers may experience particularly severe blog depression when they realize everyone is continually posting the same stuff, on every other meta-blog, over and over and over, the realization that meta-content is never “owned” can be painfull.

FACT: Blog readers want to be entertained, the vast majority will do so passively, you are like a tiny television network to them, if you do not blog for your own pleasure you’re in for some serious blog depression.

Why do you blog? Why do you Facebook? Why do you Tweet?