A Lesson on Social Media

Work amidst the plethora of Social Media available can sometimes make you forget how to be human - for awhile now, I've lost the ability to write fluidly, and to read till the end of a book. 140 character tweets and Facebook Status updates are as much as I can take. Alternatively, I scan through 10 page long articles and read the first and last paragraphs just to get the gist of it and move on.

I pounce on anything I think will be useful at work, and discard everything else. I voraciously hit "Save to Pocket" meaning to read the articles, but of course, I never do. I purchase magazines in bulk but never get down to reading them.

Where there's an Internet connection, I'm a news whale, feeding on the plankton of news and pushing out all the nutrient laden snippets I find useless. And when I anticipate there will be none, I become a news hoarder - as if consuming news by saving it will make me any more intelligent.

It gets empty after awhile because I am not truly enriched. I grow grouchy and cantankerous. And it is those around me who suffer, because I cannot fathom why they're so at ease with themselves (maybe because they're actually absorbing knowledge instead of zealously collecting it), and I lash out.

Oops.