Aaron Kim had a great post yesterday on our expectations of what social media tools will do for us. That got me thinking about how social media wasn’t the first tool that we have such outsized expectations for. For some reason, we expect that tools will help us impose the self-control around our days–maybe even our lives–that we fail to impose on our own. Aaron made several comparisons to e-mail in his post, which brought to mind my own love-hate relationship with e-mail over the years.
I have been using e-mail longer than most people. Granted, I am old, but even for people my age, it was unusual to be using e-mail in the ’70s. But I was a computer geek and we send e-mail to each other. I was even sending Internet e-mail in 1985, although I don’t remember us calling it the Internet at the time.
At first, e-mail was pure productivity. I only sent and received a few each day and they were relatively important, just as the snail mail letters that they replaced where important. But, over time, a funny thing happened. As the volume of e-mail increased. more and more e-mails were confusing communication or a downright waste of time.
And they began to pile up. And up. And up.
Eventually I had thousands of e-mails in my inbox on a regular basis, and could never find anything and was losing to-dos left and right. Then I started handling e-mails when I got them, clearing them out to do later by storing them in a place I went back to on a regular basis-a to-do list. Gee, now I am getting more done.
And I was using the same e-mail program the whole time. It wasn’t the tool that needed to organize my communication (although perhaps a better tool would have helped me think differently about e-mail). I needed to organize my communication and use e-mail effectively.
I am not sure that we should expect more out of social media. We might need someone to explain how to organize social media just as someone needed to explain how to organize e-mail to me. I’m not sure that the tools will do it for us. I can always find a way to waste time with any tool.
It’s not the social media tool. It’s what you do with the tool.
