An article in today's Melbourne Age sets out some of the possible costs and benefits of spending lots of time using social media. The comments at the bottom are particularly useful in showing the span of experiences, from some who have found them to be of no benefit:
I've tried them all and they all bored me in short time. I have a couple of hundred Facebook friends and I really struggle to think of a single useful piece of information I've gleamed from it
and others who have found them enriching personally and professionally:
I keep in touch with my family (adult children) and friends much more regularly via Facebook posts and pics in between personal face to face times. ... I have made many friends with business associates via the personalisation of Facebook. It's a winner for me!
Over the past few weeks I've shared celebrations (a new grandson for a colleague), condolences (my old dog died), annoyances (my niece found a large spider in a pile of clothes), and humour (my nephew was feeding his 6 mpnth old son cereal when he sneezed it all over the carpet). I've had a long skype chat with a friend and colleague who is on the road and had some time to talk about some common research interests and planned papers on methods for understanding causal links between interventions and observed results. I've worked up a research proposal with a colleague who is based in another state using email. And I've harvested far too many crops on the Facebook application FarmVille rather than pulling real weeds in my real garden. So it's not all been so constructive. But I think we are all learning about the new possibilities that these offer and over time we will hang onto the ones that work and drop those that don't, hanging onto a few timewasters (like FarmVille) as harmless diversions in between work and life.
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