Detangling

I have taken for granted the way that this "digital age" makes it so easy for people to stay connected. Keeping up with friends through Facebook, Twitter, their blogs (via a feed reader, of course), Flickr and the like makes information about anyone available through a variety of sources. And then add the corresponding iPhone or Blackberry apps - the ever-present devices where one can text, check e-mail, or even call to keep in touch - and you can find out anything about anyone, anytime. That's great when you want to keep in touch with where people are and what they're doing, but when you don't necessarily want to, it becomes really hard to disentangle yourself from the constant stream of information about them (seriously, G, I don't need to know the minutiae of every single second of your day through Facebook, your Gmail chat status, and Twitter). It's sensory overload; it almost necessitates total radio silence so that you don't have to think about which feeds into what, or that this syncs with that... It's enough to make one long for pre-smartphone days, when you weren't linked to everything, and where you didn't have access to everything all of the time. So I think I'm going to go back to an earlier time. No more Tweeting. No more Facebook. No more Google Chat. No more following blogs on the sly. I'm going to go back to the tried and true phone call (and e-mail) to keep in touch with people.