Decluttering My Digital Life
20100308.2121 #blog
I’m embarrassed to admit it, but my virtual life is as badly cluttered as my real-world life. I have multiple websites, I’m signed up on numerous social media networks, I have several email addresses, among other things of the digital nature. All this electronic falderal stretches me out, as Bilbo Baggins says, “like butter across too much bread.” Just how many email addresses, websites, phone numbers, and social networks do I really need in order to stay in contact with my friends?
I remember a time not so long ago when if you wanted to make a call, you had to do it on a land line from a static location. These antiques didn’t have text messaging, and many of them didn’t have voicemail either. If you wanted someone to leave a message, you either had a friend or family member answer the phone and write a note, or you broke down and got yourself an answering machine. Yet even voicemail and the answering machine were limited in their abilities. They were irrevocably tethered to the land line. Just like making a call, you had to be in the same room as the answering machine to listen to your messages. And you know something? I was okay with that.
I admit that I am a bit of a techno-fetishist. I love gadgets and technology, and I will go out and buy the latest digital toy even if I don’t even have a legitimate use for it. This has been true of my iPod, iPod Touch, MuVo, cell phone, assorted video game systems, and other little digital toys. I don’t actually need these things, I want these things, because I have a weakness for gadgets. The same holds true for online services, although I do manage to exert a modicum of temperance before I fall into the trap of signing on to a new social network. Notice that I said a “modicum” of temperance.
Now I have online accounts with at least a dozen different services, probably even more than that. The biggest and most well-known of these services is Facebook. I signed on to Facebook about three years ago when I was working at the University of Oregon Outdoor Program. I didn’t want to do it at first, but I got talked into it, and it wasn’t long before I became a Facebook junkie. I made regular status updates so that all my friends could know what I was doing on a moment by moment basis. I never stopped to consider this question: Does anyone actually care?
Being able to instantly contact anyone or everyone in your virtual black book has become the epitome of twenty-first century cyber-narcissism. Cell phones constantly ringing or chiming with text messages have become a status symbol indicating that you have become important enough to be a person worth knowing. Friends on a Facebook list numbering in the thousands isn’t so much an account of how many people you actually know, but rather a measuring stick to determine popularity and self-importance. I regularly clear out my Facebook friends list, and unfriend people I haven’t spoken to in a great deal of time. It’s nothing personal, though some interpret an unfriending as something gravely serious. Why? Because their popularity list drops by one, and nobody wants to be unpopular…
Except perhaps me. I’ve never wanted to get lost in this popularity contest. Back in the days before cell phones, we had sheets of index paper with names and phone numbers written down on them. Whoever had the most names and numbers was clearly the most popular. My phone list would barely fill a Post-It note, and I was okay with that largely because I’ve never been tremendously comfortable talking on the phone.
In the interest of decluttering my life, and also escaping the rat race of popularity I got myself into by signing on to all these different social media networks, I plan on eliminating my cell phone plan entirely, and reducing the number of social networks I’m on down to two at the most: Facebook and Twitter. (It’s very likely that I will drop my Facebook account entirely, but I haven’t decided just yet.) I’ll also need to go through my myriad email addresses and see if there are some I can eliminate.
I hope that by clearing out this digital clutter I’ll be able to focus on what really matters in my life, and perhaps reconnect with some actual friends rather than simply read their latest status update.
