When I was a kid, my mother was constantly hissing “MYOB” in my ear. I was a curious child, and very much enjoyed eavesdropping on adult conversations, and if my mother told me to go watch the Disney channel, I was sure to be found elsewhere trying to hear something I shouldn’t. In the day and age of social media, where it seems as though everyone wants everyone else to know their business, have we become a society of people that just can’t mind our own business?
With people posting statuses about what is in their grocery cart, what’s on their dinner plate, and when their personal relationships are in jeopardy, social media has opened a door into everyone’s private life. The question is, how far is too far? As more people are packing up their virtual bags and heading off the grid, is it because we’ve all become too involved in each other’s lives? Are we all too nosy?
For the majority of social media professionals, the different mediums are a way to promote businesses, keep our clients involved, and potentially attract new clients. We also have a tendency to use our personal profiles to talk about how much we love our work or how much we’ve enjoyed meeting new people in our field, but rarely do we easily dispense overly personal information. We try to keep to ourselves, because we don’t want to risk alienating our audiences.
For me, personally, I use Facebook and Twitter as a way to keep in touch with people that are far away, to post the occasional status when something important happens or something bothers me, and to look at the wide array of pictures my friends are posting. However, I walk the line every day between being an avid Facebook user, and wanting to deactivate my profile. Facebook has given an audience to people with horrific viewpoints, and for me, it’s disappointing and provides a dismal outlook for the future. Then there are the posts that bring a smile to my face or brighten my day and all is right with the world again.
About three years ago, I deleted my relationship status from Facebook, as I was going through a rather painful separation. I made a point of not displaying it, on purpose. I got an influx of messages from people that had not messaged me or commented on anything in years. I was greeted with a ridiculous amount of people asking me what had happened and even some people that were so bold as to ask how my marriage failed. I did not answer, in fact, I did quite the opposite. I deleted those people from my friends list, and went off the grid for eight months. I didn’t post a status, a comment, or message anyone, and life was simpler. However, after those eight months, when my life stabilized, the siren song of Facebook called to me.
I found that I needed Facebook to keep in touch with some people with whom I hadn’t exchanged phone numbers, but I was no longer hoarding friends. I’d gone from nearly seven hundred friends to 300 in a timespan of a couple months. This concerned me. Were the people messaging me actually concerned about my life and my well-being or was my story simply the latest train wreck? Was my life the carnage at which people stopped to stare?
From this deep questioning, a greater question developed. Have we become so involved in other people’s lives that we truly don’t know how to mind our own business anymore? Have social media mediums destroyed our right to privacy or have we done that on our own. We’ve let people into our lives by telling them what we eat, when we go grocery shopping, what our children do during the day, and our every thought. Are we responsible to the destruction of social graces by the amount of personal information we share on a daily basis?
Minding our own business has become a virtual impossibility in the day and age of social media. We are forced to be involved in almost every aspect of our friends’ lives. When we think about what we’re sharing with people, we don’t sit down to think about how it can be used against us. We don’t think about the gossip swirling around something we’ve posted, the haters discussing it off-line, or the amount of trouble it may cause. Why? Perhaps, we’re a generation of people that are optimistic about people’s intentions. Perhaps, we don’t care what other people think. Maybe, however, just maybe, we WANT to be the topic of relevance on people’s lips and fingertips.
The world of social media is a complicated place, much more complicated than the real world, but that distinction is important. The social media world is not the real world. For a business, social media is the important link between complicated behind the scenes dealings and your human element to which people can relate. In your personal life, however, think before you post. While businesses want transparency, do you? How much is too much information?
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