Social(Media)Life™ Part Deux: Beware The Lovefest
When Dr. Ding first began to explore the exciting world of social media she was puzzled and intrigued, because so few were making a distinction between their professional and personal identities.
Let me splain. In my shrinkalicious and I’m sure very rumpshakin’ world, these are two different things. I’m no social media guru. I have no “solutions” for your web presence, no PR campaigns to my credit, and no brand of my own. Not a thing. I have nothing to sell you and obviously I’m not looking to get famous here what with my alarmingly frequent references to assless chaps, glitter, and enthusiastic tooting. For you see, my relentless pursuit of world domination is fundamentally incompatible with these aims.
So what is my thing? Mostly I just enjoy long walks on the beach, lazy Sunday brunches, and poking giant holes in cherished assumptions that bug the living shit out of me unless I poke holes in them. I can’t help it. I’m an Aquarius, baby — it’s just what I do*.
Web 2.0 Lovefest: Duh
I know, I know. Transparency is the much-touted and au courant working model of web-based communication. The Personal and The Professional are all wond’rously comingled in a paroxysm of nerdish imagination each and every time you log in. The private is the public and we all frigging love each other because we ALL have some sort of ill-defined but, like, totally fabulous social capital we’re leveraging.
Woo de freaking hoo.
I fail to understand this recursive reified narcissism. I fail for a variety of reasons, primary of which is that I’m a shrink.
Of course you should be clear, honest and accountable in your communcations with others. Of course we should be treating each other with respect and listening well. Of course it’s great to share creative ideas, gorgeous music, stirring rhetoric, sublime humor, truth-exposing reportage. Of course. And of course it’s nice to feel important because we’re cozily storing up Gemütlichkeit and fulfilling our Maslowian social-affiliative needs for belonging. These are all good things and it’s about frigging time we feminized** the web, meta-communication and interaction in general.
We should have been doing this type of thing all along, long before Web 2.0. Duh.
Boundaries: Look Into Them
But here’s where this Web 2.0 Lovefest starts falling apart for me: I don’t want to share everything with you. I really don’t. Okay, well after I few martinis I might. But I shouldn’t do it. And neither should you.
Honest. It’s called having interpersonal boundaries. Boundaries are sometimes described as how we know who we are and who we aren’t, where the Self/Other dividing line is placed. They are considered central to being able to closely connect with others while simulatenously maintaining autonomy and individual identity. They’re integral to how we think and feel about ourselves, and how others feel and think about us. And they can prevent you from making a giant ass out of yourself.
Where we situate these psychological structures depends on our life experiences, stressors, and a whole bunch of mystical shit I don’t have time to explain. Suffice it to say that if your boundaries are poorly defined or maintained, you’re going to eventually reveal to much. If they’re too tight or impermeable, people will likely find it difficult to connect.
My Point: Think About Where You’re Drawing Your Boundaries
Some day long after Obama gets elected and just prior to the planet being overrun by robotic alien overlords, everyone is going to be using Social Media. Everyone.
Your boss. You future boss. Your mother-in-law. Your impressionable kids. Your Wiccan High Priestess from the Coven of the Shiny Vagina. Random criminals, hucksters and trolls trying to plan a home or identity invasion. The day shall soon be upon us.
Think about how easily these folks might access your series of diabtribes about a frenemy or your gin-pickled assessment of your job situation or your boiling hatred of Wheaties. By all means, if you don’t give a tinker’s damn about all this, pray continue with your 3 a.m. rants about whatever obscure band you hate or relationship atrocity you’ve committed, underscored by some Flickr’d photos of your recent colonoscopy. Oh and definitely keep blurting out your exact whereabouts on BrightKite so that the stalker folk can track your every move.
But if you plan to ever have a security clearance, a professional license of any kind, a sweeping background check conducted or even just a jaundiced eye turned on you….might wanna be a bit more selective about how you choose to distinguish the public v. private on the intardwebs. Just saying.
*Supposedly Aquarianism gives me the inalienable right to be deeply and profoundly weird, according to my grocery store booklet. I’m okay with it.
**Yeah I fucking went there.
| Etsy: QueenBodacious |
Most social media things officially surpass my geekery. I have officially become old. If I had a lawn, I’d yell at kids to get off of it while I raised my fist and pumped it in the air menacingly. Hello, I’m so aiming for Boo Radley status.
Anyway. I officially adore you. My own therapist will adore you Thursday night when I bring this in to her. (She’s fascinated by all this social media stuff too. I think I might be her first crazypants who does a lot of the dubyadubyadubya.) PB (aforementioned fabulous therapist) wonders why I have a “fake last name” that I use on the tubes. This here post sums it all up rather nicely!
Yes. Very yes.
This was insightful, important, funny, relevant - the list goes on, but basically I love everything you said here. I believe it is fairly common for people to have trouble identifying healthy boundaries with social media — and prompting people to consider and discuss it seems like a great idea to me.
This story may be a tad amiss but I still think it goes along with what you are saying so I’m going to share it:
Just today I’ve been a little … *unsure* about some photos I posted to Flickr of my family last night. I used to never post anything about them at all for years but have recently been letting that guard down, although never certain that it is the right thing to do. This one photo of my daughter has almost 40 views in like 12 hours and all of the other ones I posted don’t even have 10 each yet. I am not sure *why* this is happening (perhaps because the word “Converse” appears in the description??) but it is creeping me out and making me think I need to make them private. In fact I probably *will* make them private which will mean that many people I’d like to share them with will have a bit of difficulty viewing them (if they don’t have a Flickr account, etc), but I’m now feeling like that might still be the preferable thing to do. But my point is that I apparently do not already have a 100% go to protocol in place for what is okay to fully publicize and what isn’t. I think I had one at one time but it seems to always be shifting based on what new things new people I meet online are doing. Seems like I know TONS of people that publicly blast out photos and information about their kids and private lives, and these are smart, intelligent people that I know, not crazy irresponsible strangers.
All I know is that I’m not feeling very good about it right now, so it seems that at least *I* am needing to reconsider my choices here. This entry definitely helped me do that. Thank you.
I have a theory that the reason you have all of the coolest jewelry is because of blog entries just like this one. I believe it happens something like this:
You complete a new blog entry.
You hit ’submit’.
Then the next morning you wake up with an unbelievably fabulous piece of jewelry under your pillow.
Am I close?
I love this post. I work with adolescents who have no sense of boundaries when it comes to the internet. I am repeatedly saddened when I hear stories such as young persons who are using camera phones and web sites without thinking about the consequences. Then a picture of them in compromising situations end up in their parents in-box and on every cell phone owned by a student in their school. I see one of the problems that leads to this as parents who didn’t grow up with social media having no idea how to teach their children to protect themselves from this type of situation. Bravo for your attempt to reach a few of those persons who can destroy jobs, relationships or lives without ever being aware of placing themselves in danger.
Just google me. I don’t think I’m doing it right. :-p
Jamie:
Wow! I’m humbled. Which is kinda hard to do.
I’m glad this post prompted some new ideas, and I think your point about boundaries “shifting” in terms of how comfortable we are w/our level of exposure is an important one. I know I’m a lot more comfortable now than I was when I first arrived in Web 2.0ville in general, but I’m actually less comfortable with a few things, like BrightKite, Ping, etc. Go figure!
Also, I hadn’t even really been thinking about the issue of protecting kids and/or other folks we may be inadvertently identifying online, but that’s really important. Definitely something to ponder.
I cannot reveal my sources, but my jewelry accumulation *may* have something to do with the scenario you’ve described, if by “hit submit” you mean “obsessively scour Etsy.com for the latest cool stuff and spend lots of money I should be putting into things like socks and dish detergent”.
Gail:
Thanks! Again, I hadn’t even been thinking about adolescents here, but wow does it ever apply, perhaps even more so than for adults. Good point about parents not being aware of social media and having pretty much no idea about how to impact their kids’ decisions/behaviors in this arena.
God(dess), it’s like me skipping school back in the day to go to the public library and smoke mentholated cigarettes and read Erle Stanley Gardner mysteries, only with smartphones and probably porn. God(dess) help us.
Trainer:
Hah! LOL I just Googled you. I see what you mean.
D-I-N-G-O,
Can’t we have one post without the word “vagina” in it?! Penis. Penis. Penis.
“Feminize” the web?! Oh my stinking socks. What am I doing here?
Why do I think I am the only one having a problem?
Who is ndbeasle? I’d like to think that only my friends know.
Sitting at a box, away from other people, your actions lead to no known immediate consequences. With no look of shock to spur the “Oh my god, did I just say that?”, the realization of inappropriate behavior is poorly defined.
If you are younger and still developing a sense of socially acceptable behavior - or better said, boundaries - it gets even more messy.
In this webified world where with little real effort you could find my address and even go to MSN LiveSearch and look at my house, we need to well-define our boundaries and vigilantly protect what privacy we have left. We should not rely on Norton and McAfee to help us maintain our firewalls. Limit the number of e-places where you hang yourself out there.
As for children, it is my responsibility as a parent, to help them define boundaries. My nine-year-old is already wanting to play on-line role-playing games. G-J help us. My seven- and five-year-olds are not far behind.
Dingalator, you use too many big words.
-nd”not as anonymous as I’d like to”beasle
Okay, Dingdom, I’ll remove another veil from my dying anonymity. The three mentioned above are boys.
Don’t even get me started on the porn.
So you’re saying I *shouldn’t* have written about transvestite legos today?
PS. I only share about 10% of my life on the web. The other 90% is mine. And it is scary.
PPS. I need shrink advice. Can you email me?
Dear NDBeasle:
This is just for you, my friend: penis. Penis. Penis.
I’d like to make some tasteless joke about how “Hey, penis ain’t a big word now, is it? IS it?” but I just don’t roll like that.
Srsly….great points about limiting places where one hangs out on the web as well as the whole issue of online actions seeming to fall into some sort of consequence-free void.
I will not get you started on the porn. Whatever that means. I have no idea what I’ve just said.
You mean I’m not supposed to write about everything that pops into my head? But, how else will I entertain the masses?
And, yes…I realize my masses are small. Perhaps I shouldn’t be flashing them every 5 minutes. *goes away to consider this thought*
Dear Ms. Pants:
I love the name!! I apologize for your comment getting stuck in my comment queue thingy. I’m delighted that you adore me AND that you’re aiming for Boo Radley status. That makes you ACES in my book!