the people I knew who signed up for thefacebook.com were almost certainly spending significantly more time playing Snood (a Tetris-style puzzle game … - Cal Newport

The idea that it’s valuable to maintain vast numbers of weak-tie social connections is largely an invention of the past decade or so — the detritus of overexuberant network scientists spilling inappropriately into the social sphere.

Busyness as Proxy for Productivity: In the absence of clear indicators of what it means to be productive and valuable in their jobs, many knowledge workers turn back toward an industrial indicator of productivity: doing lots of stuff in a visible manner.

Richard II’s famous lament: “I live with bread like you, feel want, / Taste grief, need friends: subjected thus, / How can you say to me, I am a king?”18