Sarah Perez at ReadWriteWeb provocatively asserts that Real People Don’t Have Time for Social Media. In doing so, she addresses a question posed by Nina Simon of Museum 2.0: 08 How Much Time Does Web 2.0 Take? Each post is thoughtful, and has drawn good comments.
Although both posts are about social media and the time it takes, they address very different aspects. Nina’s post is about depth of involvement, while Sarah’s is about breadth. Nina identifies three levels of involvement: participant (1-5 hours/week), content provider (5-10), community director (10-20).
Sarah starts her post by identifying two broad levels of involvement.
Let’s be honest here: we’re all a bunch of social media addicts. We’re junkies. Whether it’s a new Twitter app, a new Facebook feature, or a new social anything service, we’re all over it. But we may not be the norm. The truth is, being involved in social media takes time, something that most people don’t have a lot of. So how can regular folk get involved with social media? And how much time does it really take?
One of the differences between “us” and regular folk is that, when it comes to social media tools (Twitter and clients for it, the BlogIt Facebook application) we try out new stuff, and are inclined to switch if the new stuff is better. In choosing tools, we maximize: we want the best, and are willing to spend time to become aware of it, to explore it, and to switch to it.
Real people, on the other hand, satisfice. Satisficing is a decision-making strategy which attempts to meet criteria for adequacy, rather than to identify an optimal solution. People, real or otherwise, satisfice most of the time.
In the social media context, real people may well find and stick with a “good enough” service for, say, music discovery. We might use several, not because we need several, but because the discovery tools themselves interest us, and we want to compare them.