Soon I will be deleting this Facebook page, though the Sea Pearl website will continue. For many endeavors the work it takes to use social networking tools is disproportionate to the amount of time it takes to actually produce something. My most successful site ran for five years and was never advertised or promoted. In fact, I ran it completely anonymously! The only way to access it was by word of mouth, serendipitous discovery, or the use of generic search words. This has given me pause to consider how I managed to achieve so much productivity previously without fanfare. I thought of all the successful endeavors I have undertaken in the past, and the common thread running throughout all of their narratives is that they didnt involve social media. Some kinds of businesses do benefit from the use of social media, but these mostly have some kind of event or store front associated with them. Techies seem to benefit the most from social media, and no wonder. It was first created for them. Facebook itself was created for university students. It has had a checkered history from the beginning as unsuspecting students without restraint posted all sorts of embarrassing commentary and photos of one another, only to regret it shortly after. Additionally, the more I learn of the founders of Facebook, the more I am struck by their seeming lack of a moral conscience for anything but making money and having a good time. Yes, they associate themselves with all these causes. But the social conscience behind it all seems unrooted in very much else besides making money at the expense of the unwary and the naive. As I have watched the lack of restraint coming into the culture at large, I felt it was time to ask ourselves what in the world we are doing with all these tools. The recklessness of our times makes it more important than ever before to be deliberate about the way we use social media. And if that even involves doing without a lot of it, so be it. I can justify the Internet as a new platform for publishing, but I have a much harder time justifying it as a platform for relationships or as a medium of unrestrained and unending self-expression. The results of the latter too often seem disastrous. Immediately after I joined Facebook, there were so many friend requests that I couldnt process how to order them all. Formal acquaintances began to act out in ways that I couldnt believe and, frankly, found embarrassing. It brought some distant persons too near for comfort and distanced close friends I truly cared about. In real life, we dont have the same level of intimacy with close friends as with people we know from the broad beyond. Most of us also dont blast the real-time public unendingly with in-your-face opinions or descriptions of our lunch. I have moved most of my personal life over to MeWe--which has built its service around privacy. Having learned the hard way about how to utilize Facebook, I realized that Facebook at best is sort of your front door facing Main Street. Its all public and you should say nothing on it that you dont want the whole world to know. MeWe, if you use it right, has a wall that you can conceivably use like a vestibule in your house. You can invite acquaintances into that part. And then you can set up a real private group whereby you can have real conversations only with those you actually know. If Facebook has an advantage over MeWe, its that its more developed at this stage. There are more people to consult about all sorts of things and more bells and whistles. MeWe doesnt yet have a way to put photos into albums (which I love), but that is the least of its issues, where I am concerned. The usability is just as good and the privacy so much better, its not funny. Anyway, thats just how I see it. Hopefully, The Sea Pearl site will get even better without the distraction of social media. Gone will be the random notices from several social media sites (including Facebook) that inundate my inbox with all sorts of random bits of irrelevant information. I will not miss that part.....(though the addiction to finding out what others think about everything under the sun will be hard to kick).
Posted on: Wed, 21 Jan 2015 22:32:59 +0000
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