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Can't keep up with your online life?
By AprillBrandon in Pop Goes the Culture
August 13, 2008

It started out simply enough. I had just moved to Texas and needed a cheap way to stay in contact with all my friends and family in Ohio.

So I joined Myspace. And it was the most wicked awesome thing ever for a rehabilited techno-phobe such as myself. I could leave funny messages! And post photos! And send all 153 of my online friends bulletins featuring a survey in which I put down funny anwsers! (What is your middle name? Danger....Ha! I'm so funny!).

But then some of my friends decided to join Facebook. Not wanting to lose contact with them, I too joined. And it was amazing! Just look at all the applications you can use! I can invite other people to join the "We Heart Pirates" group! I can have 280 friends I've never heard of from my alma mater, Miami University! Brilliant!

But then {insert ominious music here) it began to get out of control. Soon I joined Blogger.com. Then I began to Twitter. I joined the community site for the Advocate. I became LinkedIn. I shared photos on Flickr. Classmates.com? You bet your networking behind I was there.

In fact, I'm pretty sure the only thing I didn't join was HotEnough.com because regretfully, I was not, in fact, hot enough (those pretenious good-looking losers).

Now I'm at the point where it is just all too much. I can't keep up. I actually had to make a list of my user names and passwords for each site. And now, a quick online excursion just to check my email ends five hours later with me trying to keep up with all my profiles.

And I'm not the only one. It seems other people are just as stressed out. According to this article on Sacbee.com, too many social networking sites can stress a person out and make the interactions they do have online less meaningful.

And in this blog on web-strategist.com, the blogger discusses more in-depth the many problems facing social networking sites due to their increasing numbers and membership.

So what's a social networking junkie supposed to do? Well, eventually something has got to give. And perhaps, maybe, it may be a good idea to walk away from the computer and actually have a face-to-face interaction with someone.

It's an odd concept, I know, but I'm told that's how we used to do it in the old days.

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