Is Too Much Social Networking Hazardous To Your Health?

We all do it, even without realizing we do it. Some of us do it more than others, while others do it a lot more than some. We do it in the morning, sipping our caffeinated beverage of choice (you know what mine is), midday, while munching our lunch, sometimes while preparing meatless meatloaf (or any other healthy fare) for dinner, and often deep into the wee hours. In fact, most of us, or dare I say, all of us, do it throughout the day and night, as often as we can, whenever we can steal a minute here or a half-second there. Admit it, you’re doing it now! Heck, so am I! Yikes! I can’t stop doing it!

What are we all doing? You guessed it, social networking. Or more to the point: electronic, online, surfing-the-net, cyber-social networking. It’s the new sitting-around-the-coffee-shop-chatting-with-your-pals interaction, replacing face-to-face meet-and-greets with “tweets,” “shouts,” “subscribers,” and “Facebook friends.” (go ahead, add me as your friend, I dare ya!). It’s the phenomenon that is and has been sweeping the world for years, only now it appears to be multiplying faster than the national deficit.

You want to know what the ironic, funny thing of all this is? I never in a million years ever thought that I would be heavily involved in social networking, let alone writing a blog post about it. LET ALONE CREATING A MUSIC VIDEO ABOUT IT! But I am and have. More on the vid in a minute.

How did I get involved in all this electronic-interaction of the cyber kind? You’re looking at it, or, more to the point, reading it. Yup, blogging. It all started with my video website, livelife365.com. I created that site as a venue to help people improve their lives and to share that information with as many people as possible, probably one of the many reasons you created your site, right? One of the first things I did was create this blog. Blogging, I discovered, was an excellent way to reach hundreds of people, with the ultimate goal: hoping as many interested people as possible would eventually visit my vid site. Blogging is, after all, a form of social networking, as I soon found out, with commenting being a major electronic interaction between like-minded souls.

And it just kind of snowballed from there. As I visited and read more blogs, I discovered more social networking sites like Digg, Stumbleupon, and Entrecard. And tremendous sites for bloggers like MyBlogLog and BlogCatalog. As a videographer, I naturally migrated to video-sharing sites like YouTube and FunnyorDie. I went social networking crazy, and if it weren’t for healthy sites like Iowa Avenue, I might have gone nuts, or at least more nutty than I already am.

What eventually evolved from all this social networking, which so often does for me, was a seed of creativity. I mean, I don’t know about you, but I have kind of a love/hate thing going with social networking. I love visiting cool and interesting blogs and websites, learning new things and meeting a diverse group of bloggers and SoNets (my new word, just invented, for “social networkers”). But, quite frankly, it can get exhausting, overwhelming, tedious (at times), and time-consuming. Don’t get me wrong, I do enjoy visiting dozens of blogs and sites every day, but there are times when I wish I could hop aboard a time machine and travel back to a place where there were no computers, or even televisions, for that matter. And then I stumble upon a new site that catches my eye and I thank god that I live in this amazing technological time period. Sleep? Who needs sleep?

So, one night, I was doing my social networking thing, and my brain, while fighting fatigue and getting punchy, came up with the following song. I then got out my trusty video camera and began shooting. As always, I had help. Mostly, my good buddy and the other half of the Hungry and Poor Band, Dale from Electric Canyon Studios. Dale is the guy who makes my voice sound better than average, while adding so much to my mediocre guitar playing it is beyond words. He is also a master video editor. His magical touch and relentless patience makes our collaborative efforts effortless. You may recognize him from my I Miss My Hair video; he’s the one with hair! Thanks, Dale.

Please take a few minutes and enjoy my latest music video:

SOCIAL NETWORKING BLUES



Sure, social networking can seem like an endless chore, at times, but more often than not it is an effort of joy, a linking between souls connected, perhaps tens of thousands of miles away, through the touch of a mouse, the flicker of a finger across a keyboard, or the click of a link, like this one, which will take you to Mike‘s Lyrics, if you would like to read along while you watch:

SOCIAL NETWORKING BLUES.

And remember, please drop me a comment at my video site letting me know what you think about my latest, or any other, video.

Until next time…

peace,

Mike