Hey, Did You Hear? I’m Kind Of A Big Deal On Foursquare

There’s a real bad epidemic going around. You may have already been affected. It’s called TMI or Too Much Information.

It seems I can’t go a day without hearing about Foursquare or one of the other location based social media tools that everyone seems to be using.

On little sleep and a lack of sugar, I am really impressionable and easily convinced so I did it. I joined the Foursquare revolution.

After a couple of days of trying it out, I realized that not only has social media brought us an impressive wave of cool tools and information, but it’s also ushered in a new form of annoying narcissism.

Now I can honestly say I am partly responsible for contributing to that narcissism. Today, I did a location update to my local grocery store. Really? The grocery store? How sexy.

Did I need to share with everyone that I was going to the store to pick up mustard and aluminum foil? Why oh why did I get excited when I got points for this?

These located based sites are really creating a false sense of importance for many people.

Normal activities that we never cared about telling complete strangers before are now so freakin’ commonplace. On the surface, it would seem that sharing where we are with the world would make us more connected but on the contrary, it may be doing the opposite.

As we feverishly type “Hanging out with friends at party”, we’re not actually doing that. We’re actually hanging out with friends at party updating our phones, while our friends do the same. Nothing is stranger to see a group of people at a bar for happy hour communicating through twitter rather than just chatting face to face.

Yes, you are important and special in so many ways.

But I don’t really need to know THAT much about you do I?

Let’s make a truce. I will stop sharing my trips to the grocery store for aluminum foil if you promise not tell me about that trip to the post office to buy stamps. Cool?