My online participation has dwindled greatly over the past few years. Three or four years ago, I used to chat online (via AOL and Yahoo) in chatrooms and instant messaging (IM). I used the chat rooms to communicate with a variety of people all over the world about numerous topics and shared interests. I used IMs to chat with friends and family all over the world. I also used MySpace quite frequently. This realm of online community allowed me to reconnect with people I had not seen since high school. My current boyfriend actually reached out to me via MySpace (we went to high school together :). I spent numerous hours online using these forms of communities (up to 5-6 hours per day at times).
I remember when Facebook started becoming popular. I vowed I would never use it, because it allowed too much access to what people were doing (who would care about what I am eating for dinner). Boy how things change. About two years ago, I signed up for Facebook. My chatroom and MySpace days were over! I found myself posting exactly what I said people would not care to read about. However, I found that people did "care" and actually commented on the fact that I was getting my hair done :). The addiction began!!! When I updated my cell phone, I found out I could update my status from anywhere and at anytime. I would wake up in the morning and grab my phone to see what people had posted while I was sleeping. I found myself updating my status multiple times a day. I found my online Facebook usage increase considerably. When I started online classes at Liberty, Facebook was always opened while I worked on my assignments.
However, within in last 5 or 6 months, my Facebook usage has declined considerably. For some reason, my interest in what other people were doing and saying had dwindled. I have also decreased my status updates to about 1 or 2 per week (as opposed to 3 or 4 per day). I now use it mainly to post pictures and look at pictures of my family. I refuse to get a Twitter account (I definitely do not have enough going on for people to "follow" me throughout the day). Maybe when the next big online community fad comes out, my interest will increase, but for now the desire to share is not that great anymore.
I'm right there with you on this. I posted for a while until I got tired of people finding it necessary to interject their opinion on everything I had to say about anything. It almost seems that some people have nothing to do outside of what is going on on Facebook. It seems to remove energy from everything else I want / need to do. I think we all need to do like the Oscar Meyer commercial I saw the other night. Dad walks around and everyone is doing their electronic thing. He pulls the main breaker on the house and when they asked what happened and he says "the powers out." They ended up cooking out as a family in the back yard. That's when the kid notices that all of the neighbors have power. I think our social media should be kept in perspective and our opinions (most of the time) should be kept in our heads and not put out on the www. Thanks for your post.
ReplyDeleteBeverly,
ReplyDeleteWhile my initial addiction to Facebook was not quite as enthusiastic as yours, I think everyone goes through that initial fascination and then moves on at some point. I have also refused to do Twitter, which is funny as they're all pretty similar in intent and use, but Twitter just somehow seems worse. I also became appalled when I realized that anyone who is a "friend" can download pictures from my site, so I now rarely post pictures on there as I don't want my children's photos being available to just anyone. I guess we will all just anxiously await the next social medium and see what happens...
Thank you for your post!