Whether we like it or not, we are all caught up in the connectivity of social media, we only have to present our Tesco’s clubcard to find ourselves participating in a range of databases , many of which we have no idea we are contributing to.
Like Moliere’s daft “bourgeois gentilhomme” who aspired to be a poet, we may find ourselves amazed and delighted that without knowing it we have been speaking the “prose” of social media as part of daily activities.
Amazon, e-bay,e-mail SMS, the football club website we access to check our kid’s photos they are all part of the process. But obviously the active participation you are making to read this, or set up a Facebook page, or join Linked-in is a conscious step to engage in something which is happening so fast that it scares the life out of us all.
I’m no different, when I see my face appear on a random website and discover something I wrote a year ago is now being re-blogged by someone I’ve never met and being taken totally out of its original context I get worried. Whenever I go for a job interview I worry about what web search has been done on me, I worry about people coming up to me at conferences who I have never heard of and introducing themselves especially when they know more about me than I want them to!
This is the social consequence of web participation and what I’ve set about doing for the past two years is turning a threat into a positive, making my public profile something that I can be proud of and which gives me confidence whether at home or at work.
How we behave in this world of super-connectivity is an expression of our personality. Refusing to participate is in itself an expression of personality. What I find most interesting is to see how, over time, the web profiles of those I am closest to, emerge. I have seen many of my family and friends try to cultivate a web presence through the use of aliases, the promotion of the type of person they would like to be seen to be. Yet “mean reversion” gets to work and the more they try to be someone other than themself, the less easy it gets. Ultimately our web profile will revert to the profile we have presented in the “real world”.
Which is why there is absolutely no point in getting worried! The reticence that we all feel to the web is natural- it stems from our fear not just of the new technology but of ourselves – our insecurity. Naturally, the less-confident will be less confident on the web, private souls will seek privacy from the web and the naturally extrovert will find the web the most marvellous playground.
Over time, as we become more familiar with the interactions we inevitably create and less fearful, we will evolve rules for ourselves, evolve our own behaviours, influenced by what we see as food and bad in the behaviours of others. We will learn to turn down requests to connect politely, understand how to introduce ourselves to strangers without offence or embarrassment and find ways of participating in conversations which suit our personal temperament.
Ultimately, social media is just a more effecient means of conversing , something we cannot avoid and something that we have to learn through trial and error.
Great point 🙂 It is us being worried about how others are judging us that makes social media such a worry.
Thanks for picking up on that- it was the point of posting. However, it is not as easy as “just being yourself” becasue we have to learn the rules of engagement that make others comfortable- not posting irresponsibly and asserting ourselves in an anti-social way.
I do think that there are different protocols that apply to different media and those protocols need to be studied and observed. You would not behave the same in a Brentford pub as you would do in a Knightsbridge salon but you can be the same person.
I agree. I don’t think you can completely ‘be yourself’ and I don’t think people should put all of themselves out there on social media. There’s this balance that you have to search for in terms of how much of yourself you can reveal that is comfortable for both yourself and those around you.
Different protocols is also true. In the end, it’s the same as real life: there’s different ways of behaviour in different places, like different behaviour required within different mediums. The media feels at times like simply a branch off of our everyday lives, but because technology and social media is deemed as ‘new’ people fear it, and are confused about how to treat it.
Henry, well said. Sorry it has taken me a while to got round to reading this very interesting and insightful piece, it cretainly hit a cord with me especially as I am the new kid on the ‘social media’ block.