'Social Media' My Right Eye!

As an IT professional, I've lately been bombarded with information about social media and how my company should be using it. Granted, I do like a lot of the different channels and I personally use several of them on a regular basis. But one thing I've determined - they are anything but 'social'. In fact, they should be renamed 'Unsocial Media'. They all encourage us to hide behind a keyboard and monitor or sit in front of a TV and most times communicate without ever really seeing a person. How social is that?

And I'm not just talking about Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and the like. What about XBox Live, Netflix, plain ol' e-mail or for that matter, cable television. What have all these electronic channels done to us as a people? I believe they all contribute to us being more unsocial with one another.

Now don't get me wrong because as I said, I use many of these on a regular basis. But why do these seem to be so addictive, drawing you in and keeping you there for hours. How many times have you sat down to check your e-mail and ended up spending hours clicking on meaningless links just because they happened to pop-up in front of you? I usually check my Facebook once a day but I see friends on there with multiple entries throughout the day. I mean every time their stupid cat makes a cute face or they're going out for ice cream with their BFF, it gets mentioned. I call it channel-suck because all these different channels are sucking our lives away, keeping us from actually being social. As Garth says, "It's sucking my will to live!"

Let's not let the very media that helps us communicate turn us anti-social. No channel-suck for me.