Final thought before I retire for the night.
I want to talk about chafing.
Virtual chafing.
This is when all the little inputs you have: the Skype, the Gmail, the POP3 inboxes in Thunderbird (or Outlook or whatever), the Flickr, the RSS feeds, the voicemails and calls on the home phone, the voicemails and calls and text messages on the cellphone, the Tivo ever-flowing with a bounty of Simpsons, Olbermann and Seinfeld, the daily journal, the daily affirmations, the daily instant messaging, the daily workout journal all adds up in little small doses to start to wear away at your patience, you read the same story across Digg, MeFi, Del.icio.us, Furl, Techmeme and you start to wonder why you can’t remember to go pick up toilet paper on the way home because you were too busy thinking about the implications of always-on consumer-generated media combined with mobile/wireless media and a penchant for 24-7 voyeurism. And your private ActiveCollab team space is packed full of tasks that get a day older every 24 hours.
You get snippy.
You get short with people and IM conversations consist of as few keystrokes as possible.
When new media and instant global anything are less like mentholated foot powder (or citrus mint shampoo) and more like your virtual thighs rubbing together, it might be time to unplug. Actually maybe instead of your thighs rubbing together think about your brain lobes rubbing together – too much friction – too much traction.
I was thinking out loud to a colleague that it’d be fun to just go underground for a while.
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