Rancor
It seems in these modern times, everyone needs to be recognised, their fifteen seconds of fame, so to speak, except we try to stretch it out to fifteen minutes. Social media is only adding fuel to the fire, by being able to infiltrate people in their own homes, to their own mobile devices with information completely useless to your loved ones. Oh, you’re at 5 Wynter Street having Japanese for lunch? Awesome, and there is a picture too! Best like this, or they will think I hate them. This is what we have become ladies and gentlemen.
Now, I am not saying that I am completely against it all, how I can be when I use most social media outlets myself? Heck, you probably found this article of one of them! But what I have figured out in the last year and a bit is not to get too attached to these outlets. This is because, soon enough, it becomes a diary, and complete strangers that ‘follow’ you may know personal secrets that you may regret telling the internet in the future.
Over the summer, I have tightened my social media outlets. I have purged the ‘random add’ people off my Facebook, like Sihead from Pakistan, who for some reason has 15 friends in common with me and locked it down to the harshest security settings (even though I know it has been shown that personal information can still be accessed by complete strangers) As for twitter, I stopped tweeting about the random stuff, especially the very private extracts of my mind. Looking back on previous tweets, it was evident I was letting my followers know a bit too much, even though most of them are good friends of mine.
When discussing this with an online friend a couple of weeks ago (ironically on twitter so the whole world could see the conversation), I was given this pearl of advice from her - ‘Only publicise what you would be comfortable with on a billboard’
I agree with this so much, and think about it often. If there was one thing you took from this random outburst of words, is that quote there.
While living where I am currently situated, and being away from but sets of friends (Childhood and Online Friends) it has given me the chance to step back and take a few moments to ‘observe’. And by doing this, people’s motives and their true feelings have been shown. And I think now it’s time to start writing down my experiences for others to see.
All I have to say is that after being trapped under the weight of false accusations many a time, I have done a lot of thinking about the kind of person I want to be from now on.
I would like to be the kind who does what he says he’s going to do.
So let it begin.
