More than I've ever seen before, people are making New Year's resolutions for social media. Guess saving money, being a better person and losing weight are far too passé now ;).
Terrible graphic created by… me! Photo taken during the Family Fireworks on New Year’s Eve in Sydney 2011, bird is the Twitter logo. Also, the word.
Go on an information diet!
This meme seems to have the most traction of all the ones I've seen. More have tweeted and shared this story than… something cool people tweet and share. I wouldn't know what cool people do.
It does seems the irony is lost on some that the meme is being propogated to promote a hardcover book of the same title. Yes, to reduce our information intake, we need to read a book we otherwise wouldn't have read! Reminds me of those self-help books on how to make money and/or reduce clutter. I've got a great idea, don't buy books that will clutter up your house!
According to the author of the tome on various websites, the book discusses how to reduce our intake of pointless information, such as notifications from Facebook and other social networks. Sounds like attacking the symptoms rather than the cause of alleged time wastage, but that's just me.
In any event, I've seen this shared so many times, I've decided to pledge here to increase my information intake for 2012 instead. With SeaMonkey taking care of my RSS feeds and with my recently updated Twitter lists, I'm all set! And I didn't even need to buy a book to convince myself :)
Sharing less with fewer people
Ironically, I found this article on Mashable because @hanezawakirika shared it with all her followers on Twitter:
Did 2011 mark the high point of oversharing? That seems to be the lesson behind a couple of studies that examined the New Year’s resolutions of social media users.
If we're supposed to share less with fewer people, @hanezawakirika wouldn't have shared this article, so I wouldn't have found it, and I wouldn't know I was supposed to share less with fewer people!
My New Year’s Resolutions
So after reading these, I've decided to come up with a series of personalised New Year's resolutions. Here they are, in decending alphabetical order.
- Be more assertive, and that starts with not making any silly New Year’s resolutions.
Thank you, thank you.