Every once in awhile I feel the sudden urge to go out into the void and join one of those sites that are designed to "re-connect" with old friends or "meet" new people. I sit there and actually take the time to think about what I think would be an accurate description of me-thus-far. Who really knows? Hell half the time I have trouble envisioning what I must look like to other people.
Can you really know who you are and honestly project that or are you only thinking in terms of what other people think about you?
I always feel the same sense of emptiness after browsing, no matter what site it is. It's a productivity sink. I log in and look around at other people's lives and see everything that they have going for them. At least the things they want people to think they have going for them. Of course it would be pretentious of me to think that everybody works/thinks the same way I do, but from my perspective it seems like a huge waste of time.
You look at the pictures people take of themselves and you wonder if they took them soley for the purpose of posting and proclaiming to the world, hey look at me, i'm not boring and my life is one big situational sitcom. It's an ego trip and with it comes all the aspects of social cliches...except amplified 100x.
For some people it's like their lives don't exist unless it's validated in the eyes of other people.
Have you ever seen those kin commercials? It's like they're creating these labels to put on people that fall victim to the social networking bug. For this example, its facebook in particular.
-The friend you've never met.
-The creepy guy that tries to hit on you.
-The "poker"
etc,
What's worse is that these things are so vague that at one point or another, I bet you've been one of these people.
Shit, I know it sounds like i'm hating but in the end I really do realize that it's just not for some people. Yeah, I will admit that for awhile I got sucked into the whole facebook thing. And from time to time i find myself rummaging through the personals on craigslist and getting on sites like plenty-of-fish. The result in the end is always the same though.
Even if you do "meet" a new person, are you really meeting the person or are you meeting the character they've written for you in their "about me" section. In reality does anybody really know who they are? Is anybody really articulated enough to look in the mirror and put who their really are on the internet? Like those "hipster" people that take pics with nintendo controllers and post status updates like "I found my old final fantasy 2 cartridge" soley for that "old-school retro hipster cred". And at what point are do you stop being yourself and start being the person/character you've written for the rest of the world. From my own personal experience, no one is ever that 2 dimensional.
Hell, It may work for some people, for instance if you've already got a tight knit group of friends you can form the same clique you have in real life online. Then theres the friend requests from people you knew from way back when and then the whole thing just snowballs, turning from social networking to social obligations.
It also seems to make your personal information, that you may or may not want out there, pretty open for anyone to peruse. The flip side, and in my opinion scarier side to that is that it also makes it way too easy for YOU yourself to become the dreaded "profile-stalker". Only realizing it after you've wasted 3 hours looking up ex-girlfriends and old crushes/flames. There's not a shower cold enough that can wash away how filthy you feel after that.
Am I anti-social for not having a facebook, twitter, or myspace? Yes and no. Yes in the fact that i'm not jumping aboard the bandwagon (again) and no in the fact that I know enough about myself to admit that i'm not stable enough of a person to be online. I'd find myself constantly rearranging my profile information and profile pictures like i'm trying to convince myself of who i am and what image i should project out there.
By avoiding social networking like the plague i connect myself with only the people who are directly affected by my life. The people who would probably be best suited to actually write an "about me" for yours truely. After all they say that the best way to really get to know somebody, is to ask somebody else about that person. It's too easy for people to type anything. At least with blogging, yes it is personal, but at the same time it's constructed in a way that the only way someone could really intimately know you is if they sat through and analyzed all your passages. Information that you put out there in the void anyways.
Hell if anyone were to actually stumble across my page and read my entries i'd find it a lot less creepy than if they were to message/hit me up on facebook, myspace, or twitter. At least this way I can live my life and be who I am. A person and not a character in an open book for everyone else to read.
There's a certain truth, at least in my case (not knocking anybody else who this genuinely works for) in the saying "get a life."
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