Flashback to 2001: 1 email account
Flash to 2011: 6 email accounts
1 facebook account
1 twitter account
1 myspace account
1 linkedin page
1 livejournal
1 blog
1 flavor page
1 bebo account
It's easy to see that over the past 10 years my life has become to revolve around social media. To be honest it's only really in the past 5 years that my life has been taken over by such things. I was the first of anyone in my high school to get a myspace account back in 2005. I had discovered the website while living in America and upon moving back to Australia I introduced my friends to the wonders of myspace. It became a cultural phenomenon and I was happy restricting my social media to the one website. However in 2008, my friend at university told me I should get a facebook account. At first I was a bit wary. I mean, half the fun of myspace was choosing the design and making it look pretty and facebook to me looked pretty boring and everyone's profile page looked the same. However I caved in to peer pressure and created an account and from that day on my life has never been the same!
With all my attention devoted to facebook- checking it every 5 minutes at all hours of the day- it was a surprise that I even heard of other social media outlets. But in 2009 I was curious as to what this "twitter" thing everyone was talking about was, and so I created an account. Word of advice- twitter is dangerous for people who have an obsession with Pop Culture and Celebrities (like me). Suddenly I went from reading a magazine article about my favourite celebrity and dreaming about meeting them, to having a direct link to them. Needless to say that tweeting soon became my favourite thing to do and facebook was pushed to the background.
Twitter has been an amazing experience- it has allowed me to create friendships with people that share common interests with me. It has allowed me to share things about my life with the world and my opinions on issues however at the same time, I feel like I may be neglecting my "real" friends in lieu of my "virtual" friends. I average at least 8 hours on twitter a day, but probably only an hour or so on facebook. I find myself checking twitter while I'm working, or while I'm out partying with my friends and tweeting my problems to my twitter followers for advice instead of contacting my "real-life" friends.
Perhaps the reason that I find twitter so fascinating is that there is a level of anonymity. Most of my facebook friends are people that I have grown up with, people who know my past, have pre-conceived ideas on how I should act or what I should like. I have family members on there who I perhaps don't want them to know every detail of my life. On twitter, most of my followers are people I've never met. They only know as much about me, as I am willing to share (which is quite a bit, because i love talking about myself.lol!) They don't know my family, or my teachers or my co-workers. They simply know me. Twitter is a chance to create a virtual character that can say or do whatever they please. That's not to say that my twitter identity is fake. In actual fact it's probably more real and honest than my facebook persona because I don't feel the need to hide or filter aspects of my personality for fear of judgement.
One of the issues that I found with twitter though is that for someone who likes to talk as much as I do, 140 characters isn't really sufficient enough to get your point across. Sure you can use other sites like 'twitlonger' but it's not the same. That is how I came to the conclusion that I should create this blog. On here I have the same level of anonymity as i do on twitter however this time, I can write about anything that I want in more than 140 characters. I don't claim to be the best writer, and I don't claim to always have something interesting to write about, but what I can claim to be is a social media junkie who isn't afraid to put her feelings and ideas out there for everyone to see.
No comments:
Post a Comment