I used to have an attention span before smartphones came along

I recently took my son Jack to get his second COVID vaccine. Afterward, as we were sitting in the observation area, I looked at the people around us.

At one point, every single person in that room except me was looking at their cell phone. And it's not like this was a room of relatively young people. The two nurse volunteers sitting up front both had to be well into their 60s, possibly their 70s, and their gazes were trained squarely on iPhones.

I don't say this to claim any sort of moral superiority, by the way. The only reason I wasn't on my phone at that moment was because I recently became aware of how addicted to this device I was, and I've been making a concerted effort to just sit and "be" during quiet moments, rather than checking Facebook or playing my Yahtzee app.

Because, you see, there used to be a time when we as a society were all pretty good at just sitting still and waiting. Before smartphones, you were often in situations when there was absolutely nothing to do for a period of time, for whatever reason, whether it was because you were sitting in a doctor's waiting room or were finished taking a test in school.

Somewhere along the way, though, I lost the ability to just patiently wait. All spare moments were spent on the phone.

Even now when I get a quiet moment, there's a real itch to grab my phone. So very often, I purposely resist the itch and just sit there.

I've found some benefit to this. Our brains tend to go go go all the time these days, and they're not necessarily wired for that. They need time for reflection, contemplation, and inward thought. Collectively, we're starving them of this sort of lower-level activity.

So I'm trying. Really, I'm trying.

The urge is still there to go on Twitter whenever I manage to free up a spare 37 seconds. And while I'm not sure if and when it will go away, I'll admit I'm really enjoying returning to the 1990s for short bursts of time.

You know, back when I possessed some modicum of patience.

I give entirely too much thought to my Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn bios

I have come to the conclusion that the only two types of people who click on your social media profiles are:

(1) Yourself

(2) People who read a comment you've made and want to know more about this idiot who has no idea what he/she is talking about

Other than that, nobody cares.

Yet I've changed my Twitter bio at least eight times in the last year. I'm almost certainly the only person who is aware of these carefully-thought-through edits.

As of this writing, my Twitter bio (which is limited to 160 characters, so you have to be strategic about it) reads this way:

Dad of 5, husband of 1, corporate communicator, PA guy. The only Ottawa @Senators super fan in Ohio. I play the saxophone every day, though perhaps not well.

My hope is that people look at it and say, "Well, that's a witty and interesting person!"

And maybe they would, if anyone actually looked at it.

But nobody does. Because again, nobody cares. They're too absorbed in their own stuff to notice.

On LinkedIn, at least, I can argue that the bio makes a difference. Because I was in a job search for two months, I was very, very deliberate about how I populated that particular bit of digital real estate.

My LinkedIn "headline" (that's what they call it) is this:

Strategic Communicator | Executive Counsel | Reputation Architect | Relationship Builder | Marketing Leader | Crisis Manager | Podcaster | Blogger | Harnessing the Power of Words

The idea there is to use keywords that might come up in searches conducted by potential employers, recruiters, etc. It's also to give the people who find you in other ways a quick taste of who you are and what you're all about.

But again, the only person who has ever given this more than three seconds of thought is me.

All of which makes me question the value of the inherently narcissistic beast we call social media. If no one is going to read my bio and immediately ask me to come to their house and play the sax, then why do I check my phone 114 times a day?

Why I don't use Facebook (or this blog) for political and religious debates

I like my daily interactions on Facebook because, for the most part, they're fun. I enjoy them.

What I'm not so much into on Facebook are arguments over politics and religion, insulting elected officials (whoever they may be and whatever party they may represent), and just generally adding to the unpleasantness of the world.

So I tend to keep Facebook light. And Twitter, too, for that matter. Occasionally I'll express an opinion, because I do have them. But mostly, I'm not looking for anything much deeper than jokes and here's-what's-happening-in-my-life updates from friends on social media.

That said, I have no problem if you ARE someone who wants to argue online. That's totally your right, and I don't think there's anything wrong with it. It's just not something for me.

That's OK, right? We can agree to use these social platforms for different reasons. Just because I don't use them the same way as you doesn't mean that:

(A) I'm not passionate or serious

(B) I'm unable to take sides on major issues

(C) I'm embarrassed about my opinions or my faith

That last point bears some elaboration. I am a Christian. I attend church virtually every week not because I'm any better than you, but for the same reason that a sick person goes to the doctor. I need to be there. So far this year I've managed to read the Bible every day. I feel like I'm much better off for having done so, but I'm a heck of a long way from perfect.

I am not ashamed to say that I follow Jesus Christ. And that I believe him  to have been (or more accurately to be, present tense) the Son of God. And that I believe him when he says that he is the way, the truth and the life.

As a Christian, I am called upon to spread the Gospel message, and I try to do that in private interactions. In conversations I have with friends and family. In the way I act. I don't always live up to the standard I should, but I do try.

I choose not to use Facebook as the stage from which I preach. I use it for fun and jokes, and occasionally to lament the sad fact that I am a Cleveland Browns fan.

If Facebook is your religious or political stage, again, that's cool. More power to you. But it's not mine. And while I tend to care way too much about what others think of me, I'm fine if you don't agree with my philosophy. I hope you do, but it's OK if you don't.

Maybe I'm wrong about this, at least from the standpoint of faith. Maybe I'm wasting an opportunity to "let my light shine" by not expressing myself on certain matters via social media. I don't know. But if I am, I definitely know one thing:

It's entirely Obama's fault.

Here's what I use social media for

FACEBOOK: Posting incoherent thoughts and occasional pictures of my cats. And news of family deaths, I guess. Oh, and also bragging any time my kids manage to do something that can be construed as the least bit positive, which includes going entire days without burning down the house or destroying any of our personal property.

TWITTER: Reading and favoriting uninteresting tweets from professional athletes and the journalists who cover them. And sending out links to these blog posts for the three or four of my Twitter followers who care.

INSTAGRAM: Posting highly edited pictures of smoothies.

LINKEDIN: This is basically Facebook for Professional People in that you spend most of your time bragging about yourself. This would work well for me if my greatest accomplishment was something other than appearing on two game shows and was relevant to my job and my worth to potential employers. So while I have a lot of connections and my profile is pretty good, my use of LinkedIn is minimal.

PINTEREST: I don't use Pinterest because I am a man. This is generalizing, I realize, and I'm sure someone has a Pinterest board of "Photos of Daddy Bloggers Who Make Sexist Comments." But according to one online report I read that I'm choosing to believe, 80% of Pinterest users are women, and 90% of all "pins" are created or shared by women. And I don't know exactly what that last part even means.

TUMBLR: Honestly? I'm not sure what Tumblr is. It's apparently a "blogging platform," but it's inhabited by people who are, in essence, not me. So I ignore it.

REDDIT: See "Tumblr."

GOOGLE PLUS: HAHAHAHAH! No, seriously, what's next?

GOOGLE PLUS: Oh, you were serious. Well, I'm ON Google Plus, at least in the sense that I have an account there. Beyond that, though, I have no idea what it does, nor whether it's even real. Its existence could be an elaborate hoax and I'm one of millions of victims.

FLICKR: Looking at pictures of myself from 2005.

VINE: Wasting my life away, six seconds at a time.

The time suck of social media

I always thought that once I bought an iPad, I would become one of those social media ninjas who tweet 75 times a day, comment on 47 friends' Facebook statuses, upload eight photos an hour to Instagram and still find time to create a community of persimmon lovers on Pinterest.

I bought an iPad about a month ago. Want to know what I do with it?

I read newspapers, mostly. Or electronic versions of newspapers. And I also browse the web and scan Twitter, but my actual contributions to the social media world have not increased a whit.

(NOTE: I love that word, "whit." It's one of those words that seems like it should stand for something more common in the English language and therefore be more widely used, but it isn't. It's of Middle English origin and means the smallest part or particle imaginable. You know what other word I like? Skosh. It's similar to "whit" in that it means, simply, "a little bit." My dad used to say it all the time: "Move over a skosh." You pronounce it with a long "O," by the way.)

Sorry. The other thing for which I often use my iPad is looking up the definitions of archaic words. That's worth the $500 price tag right there!

Anyway, these people who take full advantage of social media for business and/or personal reasons amaze me.

Like, for instance, where do they get the time? All of the social media books will tell you it doesn't take a lot of time to reap the benefits of Facebook, Twitter, etc., but this is clearly a lie. Of course it takes a lot of time. They're not fooling anybody.

And I know many of these social media gurus. They are talented professionals who are very dedicated to their actual paying jobs. So again I ask, where does the time come from?

And now that I'm thinking about it, what's the real payoff? Networking? Sure, OK. Business promotion? Uh huh, to an extent, depending on how you do it. The satisfaction of quality social interactions? Yeah, that can be achieved by, you know, actually talking to people.

Don't get me wrong. I like surfing social media channels. It's fun. But that's just it. "Fun" is pretty much the only real benefit for me. I've never earned an extra dollar nor been hired on the strength of social media.

I have an army of LinkedIn connections that I have never really mined for professional gain. All I do with LinkedIn is accept requests to connect.

I'll connect with anybody on LinkedIn. And on Facebook, too. Just send me a request and you and I can be fast friends. Even if you're one of those (this is true, I get these all the time) scantily clad young women with whom I share no mutual connections who suddenly want to befriend me on Facebook. Sure, we can be friends! Just let me make sure it's OK with my wife first.

Incidentally, I'm not so naive that I don't realize that Nicole from Ottawa, the Victoria's Secret model look-alike who reaches out to me on Facebook, is actually Boris, a hairy-backed oil rig worker from Latvia. I choose to believe that Nicole is real and is deeply interested in me.

And I don't care one whit whether it's true or not.

Facebook as a validation of human worth

I just checked how many "friends" I have on Facebook. The number was 751.  The average number of friends for a Facebook user, according to Facebook itself, is 190. Does this mean I'm four times more likable than the average Facebook user?

Obviously not. My wife will tell you it just shows I'm a sucker who can't say no to any Facebook friend request. I like to think I'm more discriminating than that, but I suspect she's probably right.

I put "friends" in quotes because not all of these people are my friends, in the best sense of the word. They're all people with whom I'm acquainted in one way or another, of course, and I would genuinely enjoy having conversations with 99% of them. But "friends?" Not really.

With the advent of social media has come a variety of ways to measure one's "influence" in the online world. I put that in quotes, too, because there are so few people whose online personas are truly influential, in that they drive others to buy certain things or make particular changes in behavior.

I think measures of online influence exist solely to cater to our collective egos. The most obvious ones are the number of Facebook friends and Twitter followers you collect. But there's also this service called Klout that aims to measure "social influence" by tracking your activity on social networks (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, etc.) and assigning you scores in "True Reach," "Amplification," and "Network Impact."

I think Klout is silly. I also log on to Klout virtually every day to check my score.

I am embarrassed even to admit this, because I really do think Klout is silly. But it actually matters to me when my Klout score falls from 55 to 54. What did I do wrong? How come it dropped? Maybe I need to make my blog posts funnier. Or maybe I need to Tweet more...even though I really don't have anything all that interesting to say.

It IS a lot more satisfying to blog when I write something that gets a lot of page views the day it's posted. I can log on to Blogger.com and find out instantly how many people have read a particular post or looked at the blog in general. Sometimes it seems random to me which posts will get read and which ones won't.

I did one recently on my interest in military history that didn't get a lot of readers. Seventy-five people looked directly at the post itself, while another 150 or so people went to www.theystillcallmedaddy.com that day. Typically, a new post will get 90-120 visitors the day it's posted, and the website will see additional traffic of 200-300 people.

The headline I assign to a post obviously has a lot to do with whether viewers will click through and take a few minutes to read it, especially among those I don't know. People that come to the blog via The News-Herald Community Media Lab are generally the ones who will make or break the relative success of a post, since they're not clicking through as a favor to me but rather because they're really interested in the topic du jour.

Still, there are some widely read posts that have caught me by surprise. The most successful post in the not-even-five-month history of this blog was one I did called "The Art of Dadness." Nearly 400 people have clicked directly to the post itself, while several hundred others went to the main blog page the day it was put up.

"The Art of Dadness" was a heartfelt expression of my views on modern fatherhood and how it can improve, but I didn't think that much of it when it was written. And the thing is, I still have no idea why it has nearly quadruple the readership of other posts I've done.

Another popular post was about our experience hosting two Brazilian students for 12 days in January. That one sort of went "mini-viral" among the Brazilian ex-pat community and employees of the Council on World Affairs. So yeah, I know why those numbers were high. But other posts? It's a shot in the dark sometimes.

By the way, let's keep all of these numbers in context: I'm thrilled when 400 people read something I wrote. There are hundreds and hundreds of bloggers to whom a post that only drew 400 readers would be cause for despair. A lot of people can draw 1,000 readers simply by posting 50 random names from the phone book. I am not one of these bloggers, nor will I ever be.

The point is, there is almost no reason to derive any sort of self-satisfaction from how many online "friends" you have or how many people click on your half-hearted attempts at blogging. Regardless of how far technology advances, it's your relationships in the real, physical world that really matter and that help create a fulfilling existence.

Not that I'm going to stop checking my Klout score. Maybe if I just write about my tiny hands a few more times, I can push it as high as 56...

(SEMI-RELATED NOTE: Since we're being self-referential here, you may have noticed over the last couple of months that ads have begun appearing on the blog. This was by choice. Google will pay you to post ads on your blog based on how many people view and/or click on them. Want to know how much money I've made in two months of doing this? $2.92. That's right, not quite three bucks. Not that it matters much to you, nor should it. But if any of the ads you see are the least bit appealing or touch on something in which you're interested, a click-through to add a few pennies to my kids' college fund would be appreciated. Thanks!)