Thursday, July 30, 2009

Technology Overload

I have long wished that the hackers and virus-makers of the world would find something more productive and positive to do with their time, so that I wouldn't be expected to remember endless usernames and passwords just to access the many websites that I frequent. And while we're on that subject, why does every site require a login? And why do they all have different requirements? It makes my head hurt just thinking about it, and even though I have written a book (literally, albeit a small one--ok, it was more like a large brochure) on identity theft and safeguarding your personal information, it makes me angry to have to follow the rules about memorizing everything and making passwords hard to guess. Because guess what? If they're hard for someone else to guess, they're hard for me to remember!!!

But I digress.

For the past three years, I have found it increasingly difficult to come up with interesting things to post on my blog. I thought maybe I had run out of material worthy of being shared, or maybe I had lost my creative edge, or maybe my life was simply not that interesting anymore. But then I realized... technology overload is to blame.

With all the mediums we use today to stay connected with friends and family--multiple email accounts, text messaging, IM, Facebook, Twitter, a blog and a professional website (and those are just the ones I use; some people also use MySpace, eHarmony, et al)--there simply isn't enough time in a given day (or even week) to update them all. Well, unless you make that your full-time job. But who would be willing to pay me to sit at my computer all day and update everyone with the inane details of my life? And it's rather narcissistic, really, that we all seem to believe we are important enough that anyone would even care about what we are doing or what we have to say.

I wish I had a solution to this growing problem. But it seems that as life gets busier, it only becomes more difficult to find time to keep up the updates. So I am open to any suggestions from blogland on this topic. Discuss amongst yourselves.