Too many social networks

I understand there are different strokes for different folks, but there are too many social networks, messaging platforms, etc out there. Mastodon, Twitter, Google+, Telegram, Facebook, Slack, HipChat, LinkedIn, blogging, plogging (https://byrbyr.ga/H), Hangouts, SMS, iMessage, Nextdoor, SnapChat, WhatsApp, YouTube, Vimeo, Instagram… and I know I’ve missed scores and scores more. Oh – and don’t forget internal (https://byrbyr.ga/I) corporate intranet social networks (like eXo Platform (http://exoplatform.com)). The sheer volume of “socialness” you could try to keep up with is just not possible. Like trying to keep up with the Hacker News feed (and comments). Or Stack Overflow. Or Reddit’s front page (and subreddits). And Disqus. And Slashdot. And who knows what all else everywhere else. We are truly awash aflood overwhelmed with “data” and, possibly, “information” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIKW). As a society, we have become addicted to the idea of having to keep up with it all – and its corollary: save it all (https://byrbyr.ga/J). Surely some things do need to be saved and disseminated (https://byrbyr.ga/K). But the growth in global storage last year alone was 16 zettabytes (16 billion terabytes; 16 trillion gigabytes – https://byrbyr.ga/L). That is completely insane. There is no possible reason all of that needs to be “saved” – there will literally be no way to process all of it. Ever. In 2013, YouTube was ingesting 100 hours of video every minute (https://byrbyr.ga/M). That is an incomprehensibly huge amount of data. And that’s just one service. As a society – because, of course, of the mass of individual choices (often related to FOMO (http://onlineslangdictionary.com/meaning-definition-of/fomo)) – we think we need to be connected 24x7x365. When that phone dings, we have to respond. When the alert flashes, we have to read it. You don’t. I guarantee you are not that important. Karl Marx said, “religion is the opiate of the masses.” If he had come around today, he would’ve said something like, “fear is the opiate of the masses.” Fear is what lets someone with a revolver hold a room of 20 people hostage. Fear is what makes people save their photos to 12 different places, even though they don’t even look at the ones left on their phone after a day or two. And I believe fear is what keeps people on social media. And what spurs the creation of new ones all the time.