Declaring Social Media bankruptcy

Interesting article by Paul Carr in TechCrunch today, in essence he is pulling out of most forms of social media:

I’m probably not the first to have decided to delete Facebook, Foursquare, Blippy, Google Buzz, LinkedIn or Delicious either. I may be the only person this year to have deleted my Friendfeed account, but only because I’m probably the only person this year to remember that he has a Friendfeed account.

No, I would hardly be the first person to decide to embark on a Social Shutdown (as Blippy’s Philip Kaplan termed it) having grown tired of the relentless look-at-me-ism of the Status Update Generation. And I wouldn’t be the first to realise that there’s more to life than feeding the insatiable blood-eating plant of social media – imagine Audrey II in Little Shop Of Horrors – just to keep the fifteen people who care appraised of my every move.

His reasoning is at first glance counterintuitive:

But that’s not why I’m doing it. Quite the opposite in fact: I may be the first person to decide to close down most of my social media accounts for purely narcissistic reasons.

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As I shared more, though, I started to notice a funny thing happening. Rather than people becoming more fascinated by my life; the exact opposite occurred. “I loved your book, so I started following you on Twitter” people would tell me at parties. And then their expression would change: “your real life isn’t as interesting as you sound in print.”

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Social media allows us to become familiar with people who in a previous life would be unknowable “stars” — and we all know what familiarity breeds. There’s a reason why reality stars fade from the limelight so quickly and why none of the movies on Project Greenlight became a success: to mix a metaphor, you can’t become a star if everyone has seen the sausage being made.

Now Paul is a self confessed media-whore, but he is also (i) fairly intelligent (he tries hard to hide it, I know ) and (ii) is in my view one of the earlier adopters in this game so its worth watching for that reason.

And I think this is a trend worth tracking, as another memetic swallow has just been spotted - Jeff Jarvis points out that privacy is now the scarce resource, not publicity:

At the latest New York Tech Meetup, Drop.io founder Sam Lessin did just that with my favorite topic: privacy and publicness. In a rebuttal to Clay Shirky’s Cognitive Surplus he said:

“Privacy was once free. Publicity was once ridiculously expensive.

“Now the opposite is true: You have to pay in a mix of cash, time, social capital, etc. if you want privacy.”

Whether your reasoning for Social Shutdown is contrarian media-whoring, a desire for a bit more privacy, or just that it is too hard to keep a profile going on so many and varied networks, I think this is a trend that will grow in social media usage - people will rationalise onto a few ( 2- 3 in my estimate) social networks. Probably one "professional" one, one "social" one, and probably something like Twitter which is more of an Alerts + Chatroom service. (I've pretty much rationalised to this blog, Twitter and Linked In - plus all the Yahoo special-interest email groups of yesteryear, but they are very easy to manage)

Add to this the growing worry about massively intrusive datamining from Facebook, Google et al (I wonder if that is actually driving this reaction in some indirect way) and I think we are possible seeing the start of a Social Mass Media backlash?