Facebook and Personal Productivity

"Come. Waste time here."
--Miyagi (Karate Kid 3)

I joined Facebook in the early days when a .edu email address was still required. To join the network, enrollees must agree to Facebook's policies regarding property rights and information sharing. The content on your page is not your own. Facebook can share your information with whom it wants. It can even mine your site for data that it can use.

Despite the restrictions on privacy, I enrolled. The privacy issues did not bother me initially because my primary motivation for joining Facebook was job-related. I was working with an entrepreneurial financial media firm that sought extend its reach toward the academic community and I wanted to learn about Facebook's potential to connect with college students and perhaps even market to them.

After creating an account, I immediately commenced with the 'friending process,' sending requests to pretty much anyone I could think of in my higher ed circle. Upon confirming my request, a grad student acquaintance at the University of Wisconsin became the first to write on my wall. His message was, "Wow, welcome to the number one time waster for college students!"

It did not take long before I realized that my friend was right about Facebook as a magnet for people's time. Here was an novel, easy-to-use, and free platform for virtually networking with others. You could connect with friends anywhere. You could see what they were up to. You could build a 'profile' that conveyed your identity. You could 'like' what others were doing and saying, and others could do the same for you. You could measure how popular you were by the size of your network. The more people that you connected with, the more alluring the platform became.

Over time, I overstepped my original work-related scope. I had a profile. I was posting on my wall and on the walls of my friends. I was also, for lack of a better word, snooping. I was spending hours reading what others were saying in various threads. Occasionally, I'd jump into those threads and reply myself. I would engage in those mindless debates commonly seen in 'comments' sections of on-line posts. I began anticipating push-back, and looked forward to posts that I could counter.

After this process intensified over the course of years, I finally caught myself. An audit of my time revealed that I was spending at least an hour per day on Facebook--most of it unproductively. It had become, as my friend observed on my first day, my 'number one time waster.'

So I quit.

That was 5 or so years ago and I'm a better person for it. I am now considering the merits of my remaining social network connections, namely Twitter, the networks implied by by gmail and hotmail accounts, and, of course, this blog. My concern this time is not the snooping and debate problems I had with Facebook. Twitter, for example, has become almost exclusively an news and information feed for me. Almost all inbound with an occasional outbound.

Instead, my concern is privacy, and what I concede through my on-line choices and activity. Facebook is currently being questioned about how far the company has taken its access to user information, but it should not be surprising given what users agree to upfront.

It really is amazing what we seem to be willing to give away when we go on-line. In fact, this is a phenomenon that I would like to address in future posts.

Provided that I decide to remain here, that is.