To Google or Not To Google

Back to thinking about deleting my Google+ account. Trying to establish if my problem is with G+ or with Google itself - and if the later, can I muster the will to disassociate myself with all their products or not? Disengaging from G+ feels like copping out if my problem is really with the big G.

And how much of this is rose-tinted reflection on how great it was when I was regular reading only a dozen blogs, rather than skimming over hundreds of people's ponderings, engaging with no-one. I would like to belong to a virtuous blogging community - and I am acutely aware that I no longer do, and perhaps no longer have time to do so.

Comments

[Qwallath]

Did people have this issue when they wrote letters to each other? I haven't studied the habits of prolific letter writers, but how many really regular correspondents did they have, could they manage?

Would you have to narrow down your 'consumption' of blogs to get back to a deeper interaction with those that are left, and if so, how to decide who?

[Chris]

Qwallath: because letters were inherently 1:1 - and also because the time between letters was variable (sometiems months between missives) I don't think this was an issue for letter writing. The pace of exchange allowed for a well-managed communication. It is perhaps this that I am missing at the moment.

To deepen the degree of interaction, I believe I would need a smaller circle of blogs. But I wonder if this could be arranged in some clever way. For instance, by creating creative exchange between blogs in a 1:1 or 3:1 or even 5:1 ratio - thus creating short exchanges of content and ideas between different people. Since each set of exchanges need not involve the same people, nor the same topics, I feel like this could be productive. (Although it might also be difficult to arrange).

It is the lack of productive discussion which troubles me the most - the managed social media communities inherently encourage a kind of commoditisation of communication, as when I find myself judging my activities in Twitter on how many retweets I get, while thinking simultaneously that this is a shallow way of assessing the value of tweeting. I shouldn't be communicating just to rack up some arbitrary measure of exchange - I should be having productive exchanges and valuing those. I still do so on my blog - we're having one now, albeit one that will probably be quite narrowly constrained. But I fear my blog has become a gated community, that it has lost its exchanges with other blogs. I'm not sure if this matters or not, but it feels like it is less than it could be right now.

Of course, all this said, time is now in even shorter supply for me than ever before, so I have to be realistic about what I can do. But I already know I'm not happy with the way my interactions are commoditised on services like G+.

*waves*

Chris.