Over at The Scholarly Kitchen, Kent Anderson writes about the recent Society for Scholarly Publishing Top Management Roundtable on new media practices central to the future of publishing.

One of the casual cranks people make about bloggers is that they “have too much time on their hands.”

Writing a blog does take time. Social networking does take time. Yet, it seems people, and a large number of them, are willing to shift their priorities to have this time. A friend of mine who knows such things recently told me that the internal growth rate of social network adoption overall exceeds that for any given social network application, suggesting that people have time to adopt multiple social networking applications.

All of this seems to have cut the legendary six degrees of separation down to three.

Joining does change the game. It changes things on a large scale. It changes things for people who join.

People who haven’t joined, and those who are also negative, have a lot of time on their hands as well. If I could repurpose into social networking, blogging, and podcasting the number of hours repeatedly spent by these people marveling at all the time social networkers have to blog, Twitter, and Facebook, I think a huge and vibrant social network would emerge, filled with thoughts, connections, and linkages.

Joining is a binary game-changer. You either bring the tools and techniques of modern communication into your life, or you don’t. That is, you’re either in or you’re out.