Roothie's Blog: 2012

When I sit and think too much about the concept, it confuses me and makes me think a little too much! As I am now the ripe ‘old’ age of (*cough*) 31, I am old enough to remember ‘life before social media’!! The most we had in my later teen years was a small pixelated photo and limited character status on MSN messenger, with a dial-up connection!! The digital age hit on a massive scale just after I finished uni really. I purchased my first DVD and player in 2002, but I didn’t purchase a digital camera or iPod until 2005.

I have always, always been the nominated photographer on nights out. At school and uni sharing photos involved lending people my negatives and them getting copies made in Boots…OR putting about 2 of them on to someones floppy disc!! (anyone under the age of 15 reading this will have no clue what one of those even is!!) When I was first working in central London the way to share photos was to email the best ones round the morning after the night before!

All of a sudden around 2006 the concept of Myspace reached me! (It was around before this I am very sure, but only reached me at this time!) It was a place to suddenly put yourself out there to the world and acquire ‘friends’! (I’ve just had a look at my page for the first time in forever, and I’ve apparently earned myself an “old school” badge for being on myspace before it was cool!!) If you weren’t on myspace, you weren’t relevant…apparently! This site made people like me who were hitting mid-twenties feel like we were part of the latest craze, but also it suddenly brought together all kinds of people. My friends and the young people I worked with were suddenly able to read and see anything I put out there. It became a place to announce things, i.e. when my best friend had her first baby, I informed our young people via the megaphone that was myspace! I could put on a profile photo that was slightly ‘edgy’ (ie the b/w one that is still on there now after all these years!!), I could write some kind of status and I could connect with people I hadn’t seen in person for years and I could attempt to sound vaguely interesting by writing blogs on there!! (even though my blogs on there are the only precious record of my travels to Australia and New Zealand.) This site was responsible for the ‘taken from a great height, not an actual reflection of what I look like’ profile photo!

Then in early 2007 Facebook reached me! (Again it would have been around a while longer, but I’m never on top of the latest ‘fads’!) Here me being the social photographer I am was able to create whole albums, instead of a small selection that myspace at first offered me the ability to post. It took me a while to get my head around facebook, I would get emails informing me I had been tagged, this was all a mystery to me, but I got there and became the ‘seasoned pro’ I am today…!! Again it was a place to put out whatever we wanted. An audience of friends, family, young people and “friends”. People were adding me that I hadn’t seen for years. People from my childhood estate that I did not like at school, suddenly wanted to be my ‘friend’. People I’d not spoken to in years adding me as a ‘friend’, but not actually communicating with me! Ex boyfriends from the past popping up and wanting to be my ‘friend’. It was and still is such a mad concept! For every positive aspect of social media there is always a polar opposite negative. Do we know all of our ‘friends’ on facebook, do we have the right to call them friends?! Facebook has obviously rolled with changes over the years; such as developing limitations, asking if we know these people outside of facebook when we reject their friendship request, letting us create groups of people we hide everything from and group who can see every part of our profile. It gets political, we can add one person, but then feel we have to add someone else because we don’t want to offend them! Yet when we pass them in the street or see them in a pub for the first time in years, they may not say more than two words to us! (inserting a small reference and memory here to Friends Reunited which was around for a short while before facebook reached the UK and removed its link-to-the-past ability!)

At the end of 2007 I joined the grown up world of blogging. This was very different from the blogs I had written on myspace! It was a place where I could write about whatever I wanted, but as with everything else, people had the ability to reply and comment. A decent blog entry was praised, yet a controversial blog post was torn apart by those who took the time to read it and disagree! But it was a place where I could review films, books, write about funny things, write about youth stuff that worked and failed, post links to my photography (I’ve not even taken the time to mention in this blog the social media world of Flickr!) and to basically write about any old crap!

And then along came Twitter, endorsed publicly by celebrities and I caved in around the beginning of 2009. (I can’t find the bit on twitter that shows when I joined! And unlike the other sites, I cannot link it where I was job/life-wise at the time!) But it took me a while to get in to twitter ‘properly’. As with facebook, it took me a while to work it out. But now people come to me for lessons in how to use it! For me it also replaced blogging for a while, as I could do a lot of ‘mini-blogs’ instead of finding the time to sit and write long deep blogs! It was a place where you didn’t annoy people with constant updates, as that is its primary purpose! No more annoying your facebook friends with a constant status update.

So rewinding back ten years to my third year at uni: If I had an essay to do and was procrastinating, I didn’t sit and write a tweet or fb status about it, I stared at the photos on the wall behind my giant pc monitor, or I went and moaned to my housemates! If I was in a relationship people knew about it from me telling them all about it or meeting him in person, not from announcing it on facebook! If there was a birthday coming up people would send (a very expensive back then!) text, pass out paper invites or tell us in person! But most importantly if I had a problem or was feeling low about something, I spoke to friends about it…that’s right, I didn’t feel the need to blog about it, write about it on my facebook status or cram it into 140 twitter characters!

There is always a debate going on about how much we as youth workers should put out there. Like with any subject, people will have a stark contrast of differing opinions. I personally have only in the past few months created a separate youth work facebook page. (But this has come out of a new work policy as opposed to personal choice!)

But a generation has been bred that no longer knows how to personally communicate well. I find that young people and some friends will be more open on a text message or via online chat than they will be in person! People will hide behind their keyboard! But is ’my’ generation regressing to the same?! Are we forgetting the way we used to be able to communicate before all of these sites were around? We’ve moved from communicating by phone calls, to texts, to emails, to social media. We’ve moved our information intake from books, to TV, to internet pages. This isn’t a new realisation obviously. I’ve sat through many a seminar and read many an article on this over the years. But are we buying in to this?!

I’m as guilty as the next person. I find myself waking up in the morning and the first thing I do is reach for my phone! I see if I have received any texts or emails, and then have a look at what people are saying on twitter and facebook! But why have I suddenly become so bothered about what people are up to? It’s like curtain twitching for a whole new generation! But in the same way, if I find something funny, the first thing I do is share it on twitter and sometimes facebook. (the beauty of selective tweets!) My tweets differ from amusing, to relevant, to deep and meaningful at times. But what are we seeking to gain from this? What am I seeking to gain? Approval from all of my ‘friends’ or followers? Or just the desire to show that our lives are interesting?! Is it me (the orphan Annie look-a-like who was teased at school) showing that I have a great life?? Am I proving to the world that I am no longer the not-very-popular-quiet-and-shy-girl-at-school that I have a very busy and fabulous life!?

But what is the limit to what we put out there? How much is too much? I feel blessed that I have not been conditioned over these ‘internet years’ to put it online before I talk about it with an actual friend or relative in person! If I have deep issues going on I personally do not feel the need to put it out there for all of these ‘friends’ and followers to read about. There are still some things that I think we need to do the ‘old fashioned’ way. I am an only child, but I would like to think that I have not been raised as someone who seeks attention. And that is what we all do via social media is it not? As said previously, is it deep down just a platform for us to say ‘look at my life’?

The one absolute positive thing that I can talk about from experience is twitter. There has over the past year or two been a growing forum of Christian youth workers. (some of my friends think it is crazy that so many of us will communicate via twitter!) Here I have got to know some amazing people and made great friends, I even met my (now) ex through this social interaction we all have with each other (don’t get me wrong, we obviously met face to face too!!). But when possible I will take the chance to meet these people I have a profession and interests in common with, in person. If I know they will be at an event or something I am at, I will suggest we meet in person! Otherwise it’s just people yet again hiding behind a keyboard. But sadly I did come up with the phrase “twitter snubbing” last year, as even within this forum there are individuals who will communicate regularly with me on twitter, but then when it comes to a conversation in person its non-existant! Sad really! (but this is the exception, not the rule!) This whole group of people I have met over the past year or so are fab and it is a real positive use of social media. (so big love goes out to everyone from #ywchat!)

The other positive I suppose is that it’s a record of the last few years of my life. We can look back and see what we were doing, feeling, thinking, wearing and saying each year! But sometimes I do think we need to take a little moment to sit and think about what all of these sites have replaced in terms of human interaction and personal attention gaining.

What do we do when things do not go the way we hoped? We believe and trust what people say to us and then in an instant those things we thought were stable are suddenly not. I think it is sometimes difficult to not become tough and cynical over the years when the things we dream of have not yet happened, or have come crashing down around us.

I have not discovered the art of protecting my heart yet, in both friendships and relationships. There was recently a quote on Call The Midwife which resonated very clearly with me, "You have to be brave to be in love, don't you? I mean, knowing that your heart may get broken, some point along the way."

I do wonder if I or anyone will ever find the trick to caring without being hurt? If you fill your life with people, then you absolutely run the risk of those people potentially hurting you at some point.

I sadly currently write this from a very difficult and raw place where I have found myself very hurt and for very unfair reasons. It makes me wonder why we have to be hurt to learn some lessons! Surely there is a better way of doing this? As my current situation involved a partner, I look at friends of mine who have only ever been in one relationship and have never experienced heartbreak at any level. Why do some people who desire to share life with someone so badly have to go through so much to get there?

But then the flip-side of this is that we daily hurt the person who hand-made us in love. God created us to love one another, but we don't always do that. I am guilty of being an awful friend at times. But I have been amazingly blessed with brilliant friends. Some of this links with my previous blog; if I didn't have God and my good friends, what I am experiencing right now would be so tough on my own. I also know that I must hurt God by talking to my friends instead of Him. I'm working on the right balance. I am certain though that I can be 100% real with both!!

Roothie's Blog

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Tuesday, 24 January 2012

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Oh Hello 2012!