You rarely feel more connected than when updating your facebook status while lying on a surgical operation table. Simultaneously your ear is being cut open. I mostly did the deed just because I can but also because I needed to think about something else than tissue being scraped out from under my skin. I’ve become the enemy. While social media, including facebook, are in general great ways to keep in touch with people you know or think you know, it’s also more often than not a way for attention whores to write about tedious bullshit day in day out. I’d say 90% of all the status updates I read on facebook are either not compelling, from people I don’t care about, or both.
I try to keep my mundane updates to a minimum and avoid annoying people who might think like me and also to elude self-hatred, but is this really the right way to behave? Surely the point of timely status updates is to update them whenever something incredibly non-personal or interesting happens, be it a discovering a breast lump or waking up. It’s up to the audience to use their ignore list as best they know, and believe me, I learn fast. If one never updates, comments or posts anything the great will of web 2.0 is not fulfilled. In that case a social platform only functions as a free webpage, which is hardly ideal.
To quote a great song: “If you haven’t been bookmarked, retweeted and blogged, you might as well not have existed.” So everybody should keep being active on the social media front in any way they know. I will likely ignore you and hide your posts, but those who care won’t. And that’s all that matters.
-L