Modern society is beset by an insidious drug that is overpowering our population, consuming productive time, and turning relationships into dust. ChatterCrack, the overwhelming need to communicate frequently online, is continuing to attack our society in waves.

Here are the carriers:

  • Twitter
  • Pownce
  • Jaiku
  • FriendFeed
  • SocialThing
  • Social networking (Facebook, MySpace, Mashable site)
  • Instant Messaging/E-Mail
  • Forums
  • Chat Rooms

and now…

Plurk.

They’re all agents that provide the ChatterCrack high. And, much like eating a bag of potato chips, once you start, there’s no going back.

It doesn’t matter that all of your friends are doing it! Resist, stay strong… just say “no” to ChatterCrack!

# # #

Some of you are probably crying “bullshit” at this point, and rightly so. After all, Broadcasting Brain is a blog about communication and social media, so it’s not like I’m going to take a dump where I live, you know?

But, but, but, but… social media is all about communication and the number of communication-oriented applications and services seems to swell in ranks with each passing month. We can have a different mode for every day of the week, every mood and so on.

However, when we put people in front of the keyboard, what do they have to say? Sometimes it’s a lot of banal, trivial stuff, which seems like a waste. Other times, there’s some important exchange of ideas that occurs.

I’m in social media for the latter reason. I’m not much for small talk in my off-line activities, no doubt a tendency from being a mighty introverted guy, but I can rise to the occasion most of the time.

My passion is discussion of concepts, ideas, theories and analyzing these things down to their component atoms and then I forget what the heck I was talking about.

However…

The methods of communication continue to develop new shapes, sizes, and textures. Plurk is one of the latest and it’s better at conversation tracking than most microblogging platforms.

But, it is yet another service to adapt to. Maybe it will best its competitors. Or maybe Twitter, the microblogging version of VHS video tapes, will prevail because of the critical mass of users that it’s obtained.

Perhaps different services will adapt to the wants of their users. That may change the landscape over the next couple of years. For now, however, we take on each new application with the understanding that we have to balance our facilities, energy, and time amongst them.

What I do like about the ChatterCrack Plurk strain is that people are asking some meaningful questions, at least in the context of this new service. Will that last? Hard to say. But I’m sure lots of people will spend lots of time and energy in spreading their words through each new service.

In addition to our other numerous addictions, we humans are addicted to talking, regardless of whether or not we have anything meaningful to say. That’s not to say that every conversation has to be deep, insightful, or meaningful in a deep way.

But some of them should be.

Maybe we don’t need dozens or hundreds of online communication tools. Maybe we don’t need up to the nanosecond updates of what everyone else is saying.

Maybe, instead, we need to get better at talking about problems (or opportunities for those of you who’s glasses are half-full), motivations, and observations without bias, emotional clouding of judgement, or preconceived ideas. Maybe we need to learn to check our egos and self-promotional tendencies at the door and prepare to engage meaningfully.

I have every belief that social media is an excellent toolset to accomplish this kind of communication.

We just need to remember that when we warm up our brain cells through idle chatter that we channel our ChatterCrack addictions to meaningful conversations so we can really take advantage of the opportunities that we could exploit using this toolset to share, learn, grow, and collaborate.

Failing to capitalize on these capabilities would be a terrible waste.

EDITED for grammar on June 6/08

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