SMS: Social Media Stupefaction

Do you have poor impulse control? A pattern of inattention? Do you convert long URLs into Tiny URLs to push web pages through cell phones? Forget ADHD -- you have SMS, Social Media Stupefaction, the new disease of the digital generation.

Call it hitting the network wall. The internet, mobile phones, and social media have added a turbo intake to our mental engines for digesting information and sharing with others. Users are tempted to turn into knowledge-hunting squirrels, skipping around the internet forest, not thinking more deeply than just what is the next cool nugget? Hey, check out this cool site 5min.com. Fast tips in five minutes!

Whoops. There we go again.

This isn't a knock on your IQ; the most intelligent among us are those most tempted to push the communication boundaries. You know: The itch to check your web stats at 6 a.m., the feeling that some blog somewhere is dropping a new tidbit about next year's Apple iPhone update, the glory you feel when more than 100 people follow you on Twitter.

The problem is there is a finite limit to how far we humans can go mentally, even with complete fluid access to all the world's wikis. Uber blogger Robert Scoble rose to fame while a cog at Microsoft for offering unusual access on his blog including his cell phone number. Today he connects online with thousands of colleagues via Twitter and Facebook and networking tools we personally haven't heard of. But how many contacts can anyone really take?

Pre-2000 humans might have interrelated with 300 people tops if they were really gregarious (or worked in "biz dev"); now post-Facebook-LinkedIn users may be able to reach 10,000 or 20,000, but little more. Yes, technology casts our personal webs out further into the masses, and we can filter minds to find those that match our interests and feel extended kinship. But the wall is there. Social media is an ever-growing bandwidth pipe but chokes when it hits the modem pinchpoint in our brain. When we reach this limit, many of us feel the constant itch for yet more connections and even more news feeds. Like 6-year-olds at a birthday party, we're unwilling to believe that there are no more presents, that this is as far as we can go. The sensory overload, when maxed, is somehow underwhelming. That's SMS.

Whoops, sorry for the long post. We know you have to read fast.

(Tx Michelle Marts for the 5-minute find.)