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More Articles by Michael Bissell
When did Google Start Policing the Internet?
Getting back to HTML basics, thanks to Apple
Inspecting my Navel Base
Quantum Entanglement and the Death of Radio
A shoebox vs. an online backup
Cave Man Distribution Networks
Dressing for Work
The team that hates itself -- Visionaries, Managers and Technicians
iBooks -- Creative Epicenter or Gatekeeper?
The Failure of Success
The Economy is Going to Get Worse, but that's okay
Time lost on Twitter
Common Sense of the New Economy
Twitter's back alleys and dark places
Social Media is NOT Advertising
On censorship
Microsoft Courier
Form (designers) versus Function (geeks)
Bad Restroom Health Sign
PDXBOOM -- The power of social media and the portland pipe bomb
China and Apple -- Different organizations, same management
The volume of screens
Logorama
Sleeping through miracles
Who needs an URL anyhow?
Transmedia
That magical little tablet
The complications of making coffee
How your website can be in two places at once
Masterpieces created by sheer volume
Suing over lack of originality
A Primer on Internet Fame -- dancing babies, hamsters, numa numa, and more...
The Lawsuit Lottery
Checking my messages
Another Random Night of Arts in Portland
Rules are made to be broken -- in a reasoned, systematic way
So many accounts, so few passwords
The Dali Lama of Hillsdale
Who really uses Twitter? 60% of Twitter's traffic isn't on Twitter
Riding the commute route on Saturday
Not everyone is like you
The Web is a Jerry Rigged Kludge
Portland Bike Plan: Too Expensive or Playing with numbers?
Twitter: Asleep at the Mouse Wheel
Where regulation is good: Google Voice and Vonage
How Facebook is (unintentionally) forcing programmers to piss off users
The Twit Cleaner
Perfect Secretary's pitch for @Adbroad (and the Youtube API)
The Emotions of Text
The Shorty Awards Scandal -- Manual Spam is still Spam
Google Analytics, the cloud and missing numbers #fail
Helen Klein Ross & Michael Bissell Interview at Adweek's Social Media Strategies Conference
The Internet is the New 60's
Getting back in the saddle (bicycle saddle, that is)
Ranting about Portland Drivers
Cougars from New Zealand (and I don't mean big cats)
Adding facts together, or why you can't charge your cell phone from wifi
Social Media and the Destruction of the World
Rabid Fans vs Passive Viewers -- The Coco vs Leno saga
How to tell someone to retweet (without using up your 140 characters)
You can't buy social media
A book unopened is but a block of paper
Building the LOST: The Final Season Sweepstakes
Holiday SPAM (or the lack thereof)
Archiving Twitter
Too Many Toolbars
Random Censorship with Google Adwords
Accessibility and Shopping Online
"Upgrading" my flight
Twisted path to customer service
Flash: Shiny objects blinding your audience
Twollow and other gold rush scripts
Arthur Miller's All My Sons
GPS in a Laptop computer
Thinking outside the box... There was a box?
Twitter was designed for Text Messaging
It's not the corporations, damnit
Entrepreneur or Dreamer?
Adweek Social Media Twitter for Brands Presentation
Socializing is more than Social Media
Generational Marketing is a Myth (or Who's your Daddy?)
Social Media is Just the Way We Use the Internet
Twitter Followers Don't Matter (ask the porn sites)
The Internet is Gooder than Books
Sometimes you don't want your campaign to go viral
Best Twitter Branding Campaign
A Good Explosive Recipe and other found knowledge online
Like flies to crap, Spammy Twitter Followers don't really go away
Video Projectors for your phone
iPhone SMS Security Hole
How Flipmytweet works
Cell Phones as Microscopes
Markie's Birthday
Digg is not the Hijacker -- You Are
Steve Ballmer -- the walking dead?
Twitter as an open mic poetry reading
Automatic Social [un]Awareness
New York, New York
First splash for United Against Malaria
New Media/Old Media and the CLIO Awards
Interview at SXSW: Mad Men Twitter And Tracking
Saturday Yard Work
We've got an App for that -- it's called the Web
Made it to SXSW in Austin
What is Conquent?
The trouble with Wordpress and other templates
Wayward Words with Baggage
Speaking at SXSW March 17th
The fleeting Memory of the Internet
It's okay to say 'I don't know'
Good Morning America, now Go Fight Traffic
More surreality in Portland
Nike Takes Over Conquent
Facebook owns this title
Excuses, excuses
A little on Social Media
Feeding on Content
Attack of the Bots
Irish Music in Oregon City
Landing on an Aircraft Carrier
Got Curry? And some bizarre art?
Web 1.0
Random Music and Random Life in Portland
To the dump, to the dump, to the dump dump dump
Flight Simulator
Cold night, hot fire, happy cat
Net Neutrality
Walking to work in the snow
A window into Moreland of the Past
Getting clever with data feeds
Big and Little Beirut
The Other Credit Crisis
The Broadband Inauguration
T-Mobile owns Magenta and Other Patent Stories
The Risk-takers, Doers and Makers of Things
The noise of 20,000+ Twitter Followers
Reflections on my DC Trip
Born Again American
30,000 feet, 500 MPH Suburban Strip Mall
Cellphones, toilets and the Inauguration
The wall of pissing
National Treasure/National Archives
My trip to DC so far
Everyone is insane
Getting ready for DC
The End of Days (of song): Microsoft Songsmith Example
The Very Model of a Modern Major General
Browser Bigotry
The Death of your Soul: Microsoft Songsmith
Creative Development or Developing Creatively?
Race to Witch Mountain
The Myth of Wikipedia (or the Wiki-1400)
Online/Offline Sales -- is it really that bad?
Is PayPal Tacky?
Old School Web Design Still Works
Domain Squatting
Christmas Fire
Green Chri$tma$
QA 101
Portland Snow
Get some return on that web traffic
I think they have a backup...
I'd love to have that problem
The [un]importance of statistics
Don't be a tool of viral marketing
CAT Scan!
Follow up to the shoulder injury
Emails, discussions, blogs, wiki and web content
Ironic Injury
On the Santa Monica Pier
You Designed for Print First
You let someone else register your domain name
You figured .biz, .info, .us would work fine
What's after the Integrated Circuit?
Intelligent life is out there (but it's bugger all down here on earth)
Subject Matter Experts Talking Other Subject Matter
The Totalitarian Regime of Apple
Oversimplifying how people work
crowdSPRING
Traditional agencies vs. the 'new model'
Creative Services for the New World
Reverse Anthropomorphism
The End of Time
Oil prices and birdsong
Watching Starship Troopers AGAIN!
Better Living Through Twitter
Lessons Learned From Apple
It's the Brand, Baby
Business Architecture vs. Web Construction
On Truth
You can't build life
Accidentally Drunk in Portland
Al Gore the Winner
Intelligent life is out there (but it’s bugger all down here on earth)
Aussie Rules Football
Trip to Nostalgia Land
I am such an idiot
Long day of travel
Miami -- as far from Portland as you can go in the US
Inverse Peter Principle
Random Knowledge
I'm fascinated with modern plumbing
Leaving Seattle (or why you should keep your ticket close)
On the Rails
The Hive
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Time lost on Twitter
2010-05-25 09:39:44
Shortcut URL: http://t.conquent.com/oA00
People are often complaining about how much time social media seems to cost them. The reasons they cite are generally along the lines of reading lots of inane material, looking at photos of people they don't really know, and responding in kind.
I think there's another, much more insidious way that we lose time on Social Media -- we edit out all the times we reload pages or wait for a response.
Think of it this way -- when you upload photos or post a note to Facebook, you click on the link, wait a few seconds, click on the post button, wait a few seconds, upload, wait a few seconds. Or, there's the fact that Twitter is often really slow. We've all seen the Fail Whale when the server cloud can't keep up with requests, so we generally hit the refresh button and get back into the flow.
All those seconds add up and next thing you know, you've spent hours of your life watching animated icons telling you to wait. And you edit that time out; that is, you don't count that as part of what you're doing, it just slips away.
In one sense this is a perfect Buddhist moment of Nirvana -- your mind is blank, you have attained a state of nothingness. In a sense of living life to the fullest, knowing that the clock is ticking... yeah, I think that's where I see the dark side of social media.
It's not that Social Media is bad, it's that the technology, and the way we use it, is stealing away our lives a few minutes at a time. It's no different than rush hour traffic, or waiting in line at the 12 items or less behind someone with 15 items and three forms of payment.
Except you eventually get home, or through the checkout lane. But with phone apps, computers at work, at home, laptops... it's like taking that traffic jam and long line with you where ever you go...
Fallen Depths: Re: Time lost on Twitter
2010-05-25 09:41:44
"We" as a whole do have the tendency to overdo the social media but I think it has it's place for enriching our lives. For example, I would never have found your blog if not for Twitter and I have learned a lot from your writing that I actually apply to my work and life generally. I almost don't read books anymore because I follow so many blogs where I get to discuss current events or social trends with others who are interested in the same topics. I am also introduced to topics I didn't know anything about and so, again, my life is enriched much more than if I was one of my friends who sticks their noses up at the thought of spending time blogging or tweeting with make-believe people in the cloud.
It does have to be limited and is no replacement for a real network of friends or family but online life is good.
Oregoanna: Re: Time lost on Twitter
2010-05-25 13:37:28
A fundamental truth about knowingly and willingly frittering our lives away, if ever there was one.
Social media also add to the same damaging pattern that watching television for hours on end has additionally been doing to us, for decades.
(And sadly, while movie standards have fallen, the standards of TV production have actually been improving over the years, making it even harder to desist.)
The freak out insight about the impact of all this occurs when you take the time to add your sleep hours per day to your social media and computer hours each day to your television and DVD hours each day. There goes my life! And most of it spent just sitting on my butt!
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