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.
