The more time I spend with social media, the less I have for other things. I know this, yet I seem to be unable to wrench myself away. I like to check in and see how my friends are doing and what is going on in the world, but I feel like there is too much noise to signal ratio. I have to wade through a lot of stuff to get to the useful bits.

How did I keep up with what was going on before? How did any of us? We did, surely, but we have forgotten the gentle arts of keeping in touch without social media. We used to call or write. We used to make time to see each other. Now that we have the ability to let all of our friends know instantly what we are doing, somehow we don’t have, or make, the time to actually have anything worth talking about.

It is like the difference between roll film and digital film. When we only had 24 shots to the roll, we were careful with our photos. We took the time to choose something interesting, to frame it nicely, and to make sure it was in focus and the exposure was good. Now, with digital film we can take thousands of pictures but only a handful will be actually worthwhile.

With digital lives, we are doing the same thing.