If you walk into a classroom at Anywhere University a few minutes before a class starts, I can pretty much promise you’ll see students sitting in their seats using an electronic device. The occasional friend will ask someone about their weekend and a hum of chatter might fill the room- but phones will be in hand and laptops open in front of them and Facebook, Pintrest, Twitter, and ESPN sportcenter will be ‘scrolling‘ by.
This is 2013. We are constantly connected with other people via our electronic devises. So much so, that I fear we losing our desire to actually interact face to face. I am also guilty of this. However, it sill irks me when I’m sitting to lunch with someone, for example, and trying to kibitz and my companion is texting. It can’t wait? Really?
Clearly the message being sent is that the other person, on the other end of the rainbow of electrons being beamed to your device from elsewhere, is more important than the human being in front of you, me! I know I lost some of you right there… Tay chill out, you might be thinking or Girl! I’ve seen you check your phone when I was mid sentence, if you are one of my close friends. I totally understand! But think about it- really think about it- you wouldn’t pull out your cell in the middle of a job interview, in a meeting with a professor, or during a funeral because these are three times where you, presumably, have a vested interest in displaying as much respect as possible as well as a sense of appropriateness that social norms dictate you uphold. It all boils down to respect and attention.
What do you want to give your attention to and what warrants more respect.
So what does this have to do with my apparent inability to do social media ‘right’?
Fairly often my friends will say that I posted this wrong, tweeted that wrong or they’ll ask questions like, “why don’t you have an instagram?”. To be honest I don’t really care if that tweet should have been a post or that post would have been better as a tweet. I’m much more interested in other people’s tweets than my own and for my purposes Facebook posts are pretty much the same thing as a tweet but in a way that is open for conversation. And the reason I don’t have an instagram… twofold. One: I am the worst photographer EVER. Second: I prefer to live life on the front lines and not behind a lens (though I do appreciate and respect those who prefer to be behind the lens!). But, shouldn’t I care that I don’t do it right? If you think so it might be because you would like to know whats going on in my life and what I am thinking about without actually talking to me, and because I didn’t do it right that information is not as assessable as it could have been. Tough!
Social media has a place in my life- I write this blog, I have a Pintrest, and I can’t make it 6 hours without checking my Facebook- but I refuse to allow social media to be my life. If you want to LOLZ CATS/PUPPIES with me, lets go volunteer at an animal shelter together for an afternoon.
