I do believe that we are becoming an increasingly social society. It could very well be the era of introversion to extroversion. With this evolution and transformation, we’re concurrently subject to a greater set of distractions. And as such, we are sidetracked by choice and free will. But, as this is the dawn of the great attention economy, and new tools such as PeopleBrowsr, Seesmic, CoTweet, Facebook, and TweetDeck become our attention dashboards, those of us active in the real-time Web must experience an evaporation of attention span and our ability to digest and respond to everything that moves us.
The problem here is the definition of extroversion and introversion. The two relate to energy, not degree of socialization. Someone who is extroverted craves the energy of people. They need to be surrounded by people or else they feel 'off' in some way. An introverted person is the opposite; they need alone time to recharge their batteries. That doesn't mean they don't enjoy socializing; it's just that too much of that one thing makes them tired.
I'm an introvert. Although I have taught myself to be good in social situations, after a day of socializing I want quiet more than anything else. I don't see anything in 'social' media that rewrites that definition. I bet that most people who are extroverted never tire of telling the world everything. My most extroverted friends update their Facebook status constantly. Introverts are more likely to engage with social media more sporadically or in a more planned fashion.
Of course this is conjecture but it would be an interesting study to analyze the difference between the two personality traits and their engagement in social media.
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I suspect that the difference between social media usage between introverts and extroverts is substantial. I'm an introvert, and the only social media site I use is LinkedIn, where you only post carefully-considered and limited information about yourself. When I want to discuss ideas, I use anonymous handles on various sites, and I interact with the ideas people post, never bothering to make "friends" even if the site, like YouTube, allows it.
Extroverted people, by contrast, flock to sites like Facebook or Twitter, seemingly under the delusion that their lives are reality TV shows and that there are hundreds of people who really care what they ate for lunch or how long they stood in line at the DMV.
Oddly enough, though, all the people from my past that I've cared to re-connected with are on LinkedIn. None are on Facebook. That makes intuitive sense - as an introvert, I've appreciated deep relationships with other introverts, and while the extroverts who've crossed my paths have had their uses, they've been far more disposable and less valuable to me.
My guess, however, is that in the next few years, we're going to see attitudes about social media change. Right now, the extroverts are enjoying the emotional satisfaction that sites like Facebook and Twitter give them. But when people lived in small villages and seldom ventured fifty miles from where they were born, they quickly learned that you needed to be very circumspect about what you told people, because a bad reputation had serious consequences for one's livelihood. Social media has made the world a small village again. Sure, you can set access privileges on Facebook to theoretically keep your boss from reading your profile. But at the very least, your boss will be able to see who your friends are, and can make snap judgments - not all of them favorable - from that. If you restrict Facebook any further, it becomes useless because no one can identify you to connect with you.
In a few years, after enough people ruin their lives by posting party pictures or meditations about smoking pot, the Web etiquette is going to switch from being your own rock star to protecting your image and reputation. "Too much information" will become literally true. It'll be interesting to see how "social" the media is then. I suspect that LinkedIn is ultimately the future shape of social media.
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