Making Rounds, Social Overload

"Making the rounds" holds various connotations, depending on whether you're a doctor, drunk, boxer, reporter, or intrepid onliner. I made up that last one because I can't think what to call that burgeoning aspect of my life. Virtual life has become real life for many of us.

When I worked for a large health care organization, I qualified to attend "Grand Rounds." I had visions of trailing along with interns through hospital wards. Instead, I sat through a presentation about the growing threat of tuberculosis. First and last Grand Rounds.

As a news reporter, making the rounds meant that early in the morning I visited city hall, the police station, the county offices, and the high sheriff to pick up news releases, copy information from any public documents filed or business conducted since the previous morning, and collect tips from informants. Fortunately funeral homes phoned in obituaries, and medical information was private, so those stops were omitted. Then I went to work.

Now I hit my email, blog, Twitter, and accounts at MyBlogLog and BlogCatalog. Each usually involves further actions that glue me to my desk chair, sometimes for hours. Twitter, especially, has tipped making rounds into Web 2.0verload. Am I too, too polite for acknowledging each person who signs up to "follow"? I must look at their information anyway to see if it is someone I want to follow (no, that's is not automatic with me--another social media faux pas?)

Likewise, I try to acknowledge every type of contact that someone makes with my accounts at MBL and BC. Sometimes I trip over myself, posting in haste only to find I have already acknowledged a contact because it appears in the list of visitors to the blog AND I receive an email from the services or find new faces in my accounts as members joining my groups. With one of these hitting 400 members, is it any wonder that I forget now and then? How do the "biggies" manage thousands of followers and daily contacts?

We have a new disease, Social Overload, to add to Blogger's Brain. BB occurs when you post so much that your mind is always in posting mode, moderating all sensory input into a media message. Where's that wireless brain-to-Twitter link? Oh, right! They haven't developed one for blogs either! C'mon technology, I'm way ahead of you this time.

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