Top 10 Reasons Social Media Is Starting to Terrify Me
Posted at 5:00 AM Feb 23, 2010
By Tolly Moseley
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I have a very love/hate relationship with social media. On the one hand, it makes my blog possible, helps me stay in touch with estranged friends from high school, and it makes networking a total breeze. On the other hand, it makes me want to kill myself.
I can no longer focus on anything. I feel guilty for not participating in Follow Friday (#FF) on Twitter. I don't like having to keep questionable Facebook friend hopefuls in Friend Request Purgatory. I feel insecure when I don't get enough blog comments. Pressured to outdo myself when I get too many. IT'S MAKING MY BRAIN HURT.
It's also making me super-scattered. See, I can be all upset with social media for the reasons listed above, and then someone will RT something I said on Twitter and I'm all, Hooray! People care about the things I am saying! Sweet self-worth, I can feel you returning! That's when I'm back in the love camp.
Over the past few weeks, I've been trying really hard to figure out why social media scares me so much, despite the fleeting joy a RT or a blog comment provides. Here are 10 reasons why.
10. Because I can't do a damn thing any more without Twittering about it.
And I am sure as hell not alone on this one. The old truism about Twitter used to be, "no one cares if you're eating a sandwich! Har har!" So to test that little theory, I entered "sandwich" into a search just now on Twitter. And I came up with 20 Twitter sandwich updates. Updates that happened IN THE LAST 2 MINUTES.
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9. Because neither can any of my friends.
If we're out at a bar, and I see one of them whip out their
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8. Because I learn things I didn't want to learn about people on Facebook.
Hey look! It's Liz Rubenstein from high school! Liz got married...that's great...she looks cute in her pictures...oh. Wait. Hold up now. Liz is a fan of Flava Flave? Liz was a contestant on Flavor of Love? LIZ WAS THE ONE WHO POOPED ON THE STAIRCASE IN THAT ONE FLAVOR OF LOVE EPISODE? Oh. God.
7. Because I feel sorry for MySpace and Friendster (especially Friendster!), and then I realize I'm feeling sorry for websites.
This is somewhat akin to whispering "sorry!" to Cap'n Crunch in the grocery aisle as you reach for Fiber One instead. When I start expressing real emotions for websites, implicitly ascribing real emotions for THEM, like they were in fact a person and not a jumble of HTML code, I start feeling funny. Not funny haha. Funny Brave New World.
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| This is the new Friendster logo. For real. What? |
6. Because the pressure to be an awesome blog commenter is intense.
You probably know this already, but Gawker, one of my favorite sites, screens comments and only lets the best, sharpest, most devlishly witty ones go through. Which has scared me into silence. Oh, I've got things to say all right. I have so much to say! But the words shall never pass my lips--er, typing finger--because I don't want to be shamed out of the Gawker comment section.
Comments
I still prefer Tucker Max to Joe Francis.
Posted 02/23/2010 at 07:02:48 AMI'm just glad I'm not the only one with a Facebook purgatory. Stressful. Mine is up to about a dozen. Hey those people, please talk to me in real life so I can approve already!
Posted 02/23/2010 at 07:02:56 AMVery sadly, it's not just social networking where's no respecting privacy. Pretty much all of society (schools, government, businesses) doesn't respect privacy any more, they all feel they "need" to know everything about everyone's lives that interact with them.
Posted 02/23/2010 at 08:03:16 AMOh my GOSH. This is almost exactly how I feel, most of the time.
Posted 02/23/2010 at 08:31:50 AMI happily only have 15 friends on facebook and they are all related to me. I was antisocial in HS and I am antisocial now.
Posted 02/23/2010 at 08:49:02 AMI TOTALLY know how you feel. Nice post!
Posted 02/23/2010 at 10:23:40 AMThanks you guys!
I have to admit...the ego-stroking from reading your comments is making me feel funny....like funny AWESOME...ACK social media!!! YOUR TALONS AROUND MY EMOTIONS ARE TOO POWERFUL. Stop making my heart your plaything.
Posted 02/23/2010 at 11:08:28 AMSocial networking is a double edged sword. There are so many practical applications for it, but at the same time its getting out of control.
I also think that there needs to be more guidelines for social networking (from a corporate standpoint). I thought that what I did outside of work was my own business, and my profile was private so that I wasn't advertising to the world my bar pictures or what my status was but apparently there are ways to get around everything and someone printed things off my facebook they felt was "unprofessional" and gave it to HR and I was demoted for it. No where in our employee handbook or HR guidelines did it say anything about social networking. I didn't do it at work (unlike a vast majority of my co-workers) but apparently anything on the web these days, private or not, is public knowledge if you are a big, bad corporation.
So my advice to anyone is just be careful. If there is something you wouldn't want your boss to see, don't twitter about it or post it on facebook because somehow they will find it eventually.
I have a good friend that works in HR and she said many major companies are checking social networking sites for current and potential employees on a regular basis now.
Talk about Big Brother...sheesh.
Needless to say my Facebook friends list has shrunk significantly (only family and close friends) and I'm very, very careful about what I upload (and watch what people tag me in because that can be just as bad).
The internet and I have a love/hate relationship these days :(
Posted 02/23/2010 at 11:45:01 AMThis basically describes my life. Another problem for me is that every time I lose a follower on Twitter I get a self-esteem problem and start to question myself and what I say, which is stupid because I never say anything profound in less than 140 characters (or at all really).
Posted 02/23/2010 at 02:01:14 PMthere's no respect in privacy anymore. just be careful about what you upload.
Posted 02/23/2010 at 04:24:06 PMI got scared of Twitter when this lady started following me = http://bit.ly/cEfy2a
Posted 02/24/2010 at 05:05:58 AM