1. Social Media consumes time like a hot dog eating record setting chow hound! Sure, you can manage the time by planning your Social Media activity around goals and a set strategy, and you can use third party tools (Hoot Suite, CoTweet, etc) to manage multiple accounts and platforms - but in the end, it ALWAYS bites off one more chuck of time than you planned - and then your lost...
2. Social Media eliminates the art of descriptive and erudite conversation. No matter how many links, abbreviations and pictures you include in your tweets, or how descriptive your Facebook status is, you'll never capture the beauty and eloquence of a single paragraph as uttered by the likes of Garrison Keillor. Sometimes conversations need to ramble and flower with articulacy.
3. Social Media is overrun with self proclaimed experts selling Social Media skills. Every day I have to wade through DMs, emails, blog comments, Facebook suggestions and LinkedIn invitations from Social Media sellers just to use Social Media. It feels like listening to a hoard of doctors scream their prescriptions at me as I walk to the medicine cabinet to take the medication I already have.
4. Social Media restricts communication to short, cursory blasts of information and replaces interpersonal communication with information exchange without human context. Social Media is rampant with one way information presentation. Everyone is 'telling' and there is a real lack of mutual discovery of new awareness by virtue of caring conversation. What I would give for a single "ah ha!" moment out of Social Media.
5. Social Media gets too intimate, too fast. Your Social Media sharing tells me too much about your life and preferences without me having to get to know you - at all. Intimacy doesn't follow shared experience via actual time spent together on Social Media, it comes just by virtue of my data stream crossing yours (didn't "Ghost Busters" warn us about crossing streams?)
6. Social Media hurts my brain in a BORG like way. The pace, variance and mass of information traveling via Social Media is mind numbing. Perhaps because I'm 'old school' and not a proficient multitasker, but I find my mind gets tired from so much incoming data and not enough time to process and assimilate that data - much less the time to reflect on the meaning and ramifications of said data. I feel like I am being sucked into the collective mass of information without the space to remain in touch with my thoughts, my ideas, my perspective.
Having said all of this, I am still an avid fan and user of Social Media and don't plan to stop. For all of its quirks and peculiarities Social Media does offer a novel and unique access to others and information. Social Media is the voice of the masses. It is a ground swell movement through which we all get to speak and influence our world. News is quickly dispensed (if sometimes erroneously) and public opinion is rapid fire available on social, political, business and consumer issues - and much more. Social Media is becoming a platform for businesses to more directly engage consumers and has the potential to evolve into a new and more agile way of marketing. It may be that in a matter of months all of this may change and we may remember the Social Media craze as a flash in the pan occurrence (I don't think so really), but at least I can say I was there when.
