Irony and Transaction Costs.

The other day I came across a person on Facebook who is a member of two different groups that promote simple living.  Straightforward enough.  I've seen the magazines and I sympathize, to a point.

But the irony wasn't lost on me.  To cut back on material things in life, to live intentionally, to forsake baubles and distractions and yet, obviously to join not one, but two of these groups appeared a little over the top.  Through casual observation, it became clear that many people invest a great deal of time into these online communities and groups.  Simple it was not.

At about the same time, a great discussion on Scobleizer's FriendFeed featured the challenges of the latest, greatest social media aggregation tools.  How do you get all the conversations, all the posts, reviews, comments and other digital flotsam into a single platform or to publish across platforms?  To deny this need to be swallowed by the greatest transaction cost of all.  We each face a scarcity of time and energy.  

I post to Twitter, it goes to my Facebook status, onto FriendFeed and into the sidebar of Radical Immersion.  Without the aggregator of RSS, the cost of reposting the same thought would be prohibitive.  Even simple posts remain "mental notes" throughout most days because of the urgency presented by other activities.

With all of these time saving technologies it is still hard to post more than once or twice a day.  I wonder about these people with thousands of followers.  Do they have day jobs?  Do they talk to their families?  Or, are the families online?