Logged in as?
Posted by Atif Hussein, April 16, 2010
Twenty years ago, when I arrived 
in the Bay Area from the UK,
I could talk to my mom for 10 minutes for $10. Now, the kids talk to Grandma on Skype for an hour on Sunday morning and it doesn’t cut into my budget. But there is another side to this increasing and easy connectivity and I don’t know if it is friend or nuisance, but it is disrupting my life at an alarming rate.
As I was trying to stay connected to my family from a continent away, email emerged and I could get a reply within minutes. My email experience quickly grew to my friends, family, my bank, my brokerage account and online shopping. In a short time I needed multiple identities to manage my activities and that doesn’t even include my IM accounts. I was having trouble knowing who I was “logged in as,” and not in the reflective existential way. I literally could not remember all my passwords and account names.
Enter the lure of these cool new social networking sites to stay connected to friends and family, leaving the business stuff to email. Good plan. I have my friends on Facebook and great conversations when I tweet; this is just what I needed! Wait a minute, who just started following me on Twitter? I don’t even know that person…and these friend requests, I have no idea who these people are. Yikes! How did I get 486 friends on Facebook? This was supposed to keep me connected to the people who are important in my life.
I have to admit that at times I feel like I am riding the technology roller coaster. I don’t want to get off, but I need some way to make it work for me. Some connections are deeply important to me, others not so much. Is there a way to have the best of both worlds? Can I keep in touch with the crowd and still have the time for the deep, meaningful conversations with those that matter most? Can I manage staying connected without being overwhelmed with friend requests and information? What about the pieces I don’t want to share with everyone, just a few? At Nokia, my quest is to look for these answers…I would love to know how you are dealing with this.
1
I’ll be back again, thanks for the info.