What If You Don’t Want to Communicate?

According to the good folks at the Twitter Power System blog, back in June the average Twitter user spent just a hair over 31 minutes a day on the site and was one of 61 million unique visitors in that month.

Who knows how much time people spent on Facebook in June, but there were reportedly 122.5 million unique visitors to the site that month.

Personally, I’m still stuck on the first statistic – 61 million people spending 31 minutes a day. That works out to 1,891,000,000 minutes, or 3 ¼ million hours, spent on Twitter in one month alone.

How much of that time do you think was well spent?

Sometimes I think we’re so busy tweeting, posting and updating that we don’t give ourselves enough time to come up with anything interesting to say.

I know we don’t give ourselves enough time to process it. I’m sure if I really went through each item that appears in my various in-boxes I’d barely have enough time left to throw out my snail mail.

What, really, are we gaining with this avalanche of information? Sometimes, I grant you, it can help bring people together across distances. But then again, it can also drive people further apart who are standing right next to each other. How many times have you tried to have a conversation with someone who was texting someone else, or seen two people sitting at a table, each on their own cell phone?

I think a lot of this electronic excess is the 21st century equivalent of doing forms in triplicate. Do you remember that? One form went to the customer, who threw it out, another stayed with the office manager who filed it and never looked at it again and no one ever knew what the third or fourth copies were for, anyway.

Of course, it’s no one’s business how you or I might choose to fritter away our free time.

However, I do think our tendency towards constant communication can be a problem in the workplace or classroom. In an educational setting, I think teachers and professors are well within their rights to require all such devices shut off.

But what about at work? Not only are employees adults, who should be entrusted with some control over how they spend their time, but some of the messages people receive will help them do their jobs better.

How and where do you draw the line? What do you think?

And I have one last question. It’s rather personal, but – what if you don’t want to communicate?

Related posts:

1. Five Ways to Communicate When Expertise Varies