So I was chatting with friends over the past few days about just how much communication there is going on. One person asked me if I was on Twitter or Facebook. I said no. The other was saying how we had communicated more over the past few days since he found out that I had a Blackberry and he was using the chat client on there. So it got me thinking about just how we communicate as people. It is not just about the information superhighway, it might be the information supersaturation of communication. I went through and started to count how many communication tools/identities I have:

Email

I have e-mails attached with some of the Chat Clients I use, but I don’t really count those if I don’t use them.

1. Personal E-Mail
2. Administrative E-Mail for the domain
3. “Rounders” Personal E-Mail
4. “Rounders” Adminstrator E-Mail
5. “Rounders” Financial E-Mail
6. BMW MOA Foundation E-Mail
7. ISP Provider E-Mail
8. Google Mail
9. Main Work E-Mail
10. Work Help E-Mail
11. Work Custom E-Mail

Messaging IDs

In alphabetical order:

1. America Online Instant Messenger
2. Bonjour
3. Google Chat
4. Mac iChat
5. Microsoft/Hotmail Messenger
6. Skype
7. Yahoo
8. Blackberry Messenger (It is a work Blackberry)

Online Communities

In alphabetical order, once again the ones I frequent:

1. BMW MOA
2. Digital Grin
3. LinkedIn
4. Plaxo
5. “Rounders“

Phone Numbers

1. Work Main Line
2. Work Key Account Phone Number
3. Work Direct Dial
4. Work Cell Phone
5. Work Fax
6. Home Phone
7. Home Fax (soon to be disconnected)

So there are quite a few ways to get in touch with me. I do have a work Blackberry and a wireless broadband card for my laptop so the internet is never far from me.  I am even contemplating adding a personal cell phone so that when I am “off” work I can unplug from work.  With all these methods of communication, people are asking if I use other “communication tools” such as Facebook, Loopt, Google’s Friend Connect, or Goggle Latitude. If I am thinking of adding  Google Voice?  They are asking if I want to join them on some of these  services. My answer is “No”.

Do I want everyone know where I am and what I am doing all the time?
If I want people to know what I am doing, I can contact them. I should not rely on a service to broadcast this information for me. I do update things in the forums/communities at my choosing. I will contact people when I am traveling to their areas or the trip might interest them. I can post things to this blog and people can come and read it if they want. I consider what I should and should not post of this blog, what should be public for everyone, both known and unknown to me to be aware of and what should I share with people I know.

Do I need to know what everyone else is doing?
I am not sure I am actually that interested in what everyone else is doing that I need to see what is going on in their life or where they are located. I understand that people want to share stuff and think that some of these tools are ways of broadcasting their locations, thoughts, and actions. (I will freely admit that I am doing this exact thing here.) I understand how from a social interaction standpoint this could be cool. If one is traveling for work, they might want to know if any friends/acquaintances are in there area so that they can meet.

Do I need to be in contact with everyone at all times?
I need the ability to focus on the task at hand and manage who and when I can be contacted. My office phone system has Avaya’s Unified Messaging and I have turned off most of the features that Google Voice is touting.

I want a control over my status, mood, and location – as well as who has access to it. While chatting online with one of my friends we swapped stories about people reading our blogs. I indicated how I am starting to be more careful in what I am posting in my blog after a coworker came up to me and asked if they were the subject of a blog post. It was very awkward. My friend indicated how it was weird after a relative of his passed that people he did not know were coming up to him and saying that they were sorry for his loss.

I also thought about just how much information people are sharing about themselves. At some point are people so busy living vicariously through other people, their blogs, their tweets, and their websites that they don’t have enough time for their own activities? At one point I was so involved with the online forums that I spent about four hours a night online reading every post on one of the forums I am a member of. I literally read every single post on the forum. I did not realize the amount of other things that I was missing as a result of the time spent reading all these things. What did I gain from this information on the forums? To be honest I could not retain or comprehend much of it, I was too busy just reading it to “keep up”.

So while talking with a friend, the topic of how many RSS feeds he was subscribed to came up and it was more than he could count easily. I asked him how he read them all. He indicated that he goes not always get to them, but he has them divided into days of the week so it is reasonable amounts. I was in shock, I wonder how much is just plain overload and not being retained. Will it be awkward when he reads this post be the RSS subscription he has to this blog on Monday? I actually think it depends if he can absorb it with all the other things he is reading. In full disclosure, I subscribe to about ten feeds for work purposes some of which are internal feeds to let me know what has been updated on our intranet; for personal use I have 40 currently of which three  are my own feeds. Many of these RSS feeds are infrequently updated, such as when my family posts new pictures, when a friend has a new blog post, or when there is a new product update. I use it as a tool for the software to go out and get the information I am interested in, instead of reading everything out there and getting distracted by tangents. I will also browse the shared items from friends through Google Reader. However I find that I spend about fifteen minutes a day on RSS feeds, very reasonable in my opinion.

Just for laughs I searched for myself on Google and Yahoo and was amazed at how much of the results were truly me, and not just similiar names. (Yahoo had more about “me” than Google which showed that one truly does get different results.)

Now if you will excuse me, I am going to spend some time reading a book as I want to know more about Cascading Style Sheets.