“Being ‘connected’ sucks,” he says. “It is highly overrated and getting old fast.”

Well, I might suggest that being connected doesn’t necessarily suck, but being over-connected certainly has its drawbacks. Do I need my cell phone? Yes, it is my main point of immediate contact for my business. Do I need to have it on and have the Bluetooth dongle in my ear 24/7? Certainly not. Do I need to Twitter everything I do just because I can? No way. (In fact, I had been using it as another way to broadcast my blog posts, but ya know what? That’s just too much of a pain in the ass and I’ve got work to do. But I have been considering extreme, absurd Twittering just so I can let anyone who cares know that I just took a leak or I’m picking my nose right now. Oops, you missed it.)

There were some surprisingly negative responses to David’s very valid argument. But I think the bottom line is that we should recognize technology and the connectivity it gives us for what it is: a tool that allows us to be more productive. When it starts making us less productive, it’s time to turn it off. Like a kid given free reign at the candy store after having never before tasted sugar, we’re a society that doesn’t know when to say enough is enough.

And sometimes, even when you do need to be connected, you just gotta turn it off. Go outside and play. Catch up on your reading. Play with the kids. Take the dog for a walk. (Just don’t Twitter it.) It’s good practice for when the power goes out for real.

And now that I’m self-employed I have no problem doing those things when it does. It makes me realize just how tweaked we as a society have become that we don’t know what to do with ourselves when the power goes out. When I was working for the man I felt so compelled to be productive every minute of my day, and we were so “connected” while doing our jobs, that it felt like we couldn’t get anything done even when (gasp!) the Internet went down.

David’s second point directly supports an aspect of marketing I feel strongly about: utility. He states that this level of ADHC is making marketing more difficult. Rather—and I think David may have coined a new marketing term here—

…the solution for marketers is to steer into the skid. Marketing that appears next to content will get ignored. Marketing is going to have to become deeply integrated into the communication platforms.

What does that have to do with utility, you might ask? Perhaps the most effective way for marketers to incorporate their message into the content is to make it useful, provide some value. As a marketer with a journalism background, I see real potential for conflict here, but I also see potential to make marketing a useful tool for the customer. (I feel compelled to admit that even I, here on this blog, have missed the mark in successfully incorporating advertising in to this publication and have fallen prey to just how easy it is to simply tack on traditional, questionably effective advertising components.)

But just because utility can be more effective, it doesn’t mean that all businesses or organizations are willing to embrace it just yet. I’m not sure if it’s the same on a national level, but here in the small community in which I live and work—a relatively business- and tech-savvy community though it is—it’s often difficult to get small businesses and non-profits to embrace interactive online marketing and break out of the old habit of simply placing print ads in the local paper and calling it good. That said, it is a community where putting in face time, whether pressing the flesh in a business environment or simply being an active community member, is still a very effective way to get business done.

I think part of what David is getting at here is authenticity. We owe it to each other and ourselves to turn down the volume a bit. We’ll all feel better and less harried if we learn to disconnect and simply slow down. But—and this is the other part of what he’s saying—as marketing channels become increasingly fragmented, and not everyone is going to slow down, we as marketers need to learn to reach and engage our audience in new and innovative ways.

But the one that caught my attention was this video featuring a short interview with the director of the new documentary from Mosaic Films titled “King Corn.” Having just started Michael Pollan’s “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” I knew right away that the premise was the scarily too-close-to-home reality that we’re all “corn people.” Watch the video. Check out the trailer. Go see the movie. Read Michael’s book if you so desire. And then think very, very hard about the decisions you make about what you and your family eat.

So I’ve decided to shake things up a little and take this blog in some new directions.

• From now on this blog will have more personal reflection, hopefully staying as close as I can to the main topic, but don’t be surprised if I go off on a bit of a tangent from time to time.

• I know I’ll never make much money by blogging, but I hope to build more traffic and hopefully at least offset the cost of hosting fees and some of the time I dedicate to it. ($16.97 in AdSense “revenue” in six months doesn’t seem to be cutting it)

• I’m on the hunt for a new theme. This theme was never intended to be the ideal theme for this blog, but it satisfied some basic criteria (it’s green and has three columns) and got me up and running. I’ve been playing around with a few others, but nothing has struck me as the optimum yet. So don’t be surprised to see a new look here from time to time as I throw caution to the wind and try out some new looks.

• The world is my oyster but I seem to be stuck in clam muck. The blog has been stagnating a bit because there are so many other things going on in my life. Family, of course, takes the most of the time from which I try to sneak a few minutes of writing (as it rightly should), but the ability to take advantage of the lifestyle I prefer and balance it with a rewarding professional life isn’t happening the way I would like. There are changes in the wind and I plan on taking full advantage of them.

• I spend a bit of time (perhaps too much) checking out other blogs and reading about what’s going on in the world of online and green marketing, so I’ll start sharing more of that here so you can see where my interests lie.

Most of all, this blog is a conversation, so please don’t hesitate to let me know if you like or don’t like what you’re seeing here, or if you have suggestions for topics to cover.

In parting, here are a few things I’ve read in the last day or so:

This New York Times article on blogging is pretty basic, but it got me thinking and the juices flowing.

Though I practice yoga regularly, do so with one of the yogis on Yoga Today, and work for the company that built and manages their site, I’d never spent so much as a second on my mat in front of the computer. Last night was the first time and it was really great. I highly recommend it, and it’s a fairly green way to get your yoga done if you’re like me and need someone to walk you through a routine.

I came across this great site with satellite maps of some of the best North American ski terrain while working on a post for NewWest.net’s Snowblog.

Here and here are a couple of blogs by some Jackson locals who seem to have figured out the balance between life and work. Good on ya!

It’s the first day of spring but you wouldn’t know that from this morning’s snow report. Forty inches since Tuesday! What a winter!