Merlin Mann wrote a great post called “Social Networks: The Case for a Social Network Pause Button“, where he suggests we need a few more states of engagement with social network applications as a way to manage the deluge of data.

I’ve got a better solution. Walk away. Do something else. Here’s my social network pause button, and it’s extremely effective:

motion

It pauses everything. No inbox. No RSS. No IM. No friend requests. No followers. No super-pokes. No zombie bites. No updates. No is… Nothing but me, my bike, and the wind.

Jen has her own system.

Don’t we all have Pause Buttons already? We just need to use them. We’re all in control of our engagement with these tools, we just need to realize that, and exercise our own control to our own levels of comfort.

Comments

3 Responses to “my social network pause button”

  1. Scott Leslie on August 29th, 2008 12:07 pm

    Umm, who are you again? I forget. I seem to remember way back in history (like 2 weeks ago) some guy named dnorman, but he hasn’t been on any of my social networks since then. What was your expertise again? Crockery? Knitting? Aren’t you that Wordpress fanboy? Remind me ;-)

  2. dnorman on August 29th, 2008 12:53 pm

    Crockery. Definitely crockery. You missed my return to MovableType, too!

  3. Open Thinking & Digital Pedagogy » Get Unplugged on September 4th, 2008 10:32 am

    [...] has been some important discussion as of late about renegotiating relationships and our ties with social network tools and [...]

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