Twitter: Say what you mean or shut up!

It's hard to trust people who spend their time advancing personal agendas at other’s expense or inconvenience. While we can walk out on deals when a sales person starts laying on extra heavy deal closer moves, there is something especially galling and intrusive about vermin who lurk around social media sites built on consensus and trust, attempting to advance an agenda behind the faceless anonymity of typed interchanges.

Whether the offenders are predators injecting paranoia by requesting sexual services, get-rich-quick boneheads plying lamebrain pseudo-pyramid schemes for raking money off the top by making money off the uninitiated, or even the silly bandwidth-wasting schemes for attracting a bajillion twitter followers, I don’t understand the social media abuser genre in general, but wish they would either shut up or jump off a bridge.

Don’t personally understand why anyone even cares about number of Twitter followers. As long as your following includes people who communicate with you (or at least that you would be willing to communicate with), empathize with you, and otherwise help you understand yourself and others (while you hopefully return the favor), 20 followers is as good as 2000, and a helluva lot easier to follow. Spammers don’t communicate with you, waste your time, and abuse your bandwidth. In the case of unsolicited pervs, there is good scientific evidence that tar and feathers is an appropriate medical treatment for the disorder.

You can get a lot of interpersonal understanding from the angst and limit-testing curses than is immediately obvious, and there is often more purpose to these faceless and non-physical exchanges than realizable while they are taking place. As you understand your neighbors, you understand yourself better. We all go together, if we don’t do so we may never arrive at the right place.

Facebook: When in doubt, shout it out

Okay, it’s a great platform for organizing your family and friends into groups, reconnecting with those with whom you lost contact forever ago, and generally connecting with like-minded friendly cohorts, but Facebook is also a great place to confront your preconceptions and learn some new ways of looking at life, love, perceptions, and maybe even discovering just exactly what really makes you happy. Stranger things have happened.

I get a great deal of pleasure from finding Facebook friends from across the globe and finding threads of commonality among all those who connect. It’s easy enough to get affirmation from those in your culture, age group, and with similar social/political leanings, but why not see just how little separates you from those who are as dissimilar as possible along several spectrums, but extraordinary examples of humanity struggling with issues that may be different but remarkably similar overall. Embrace the human race, we’re all in it together…

Change of Heart, Change of Mind

Well, I could be wrong, happens more often than not. It's sometimes/always hard to admit, but true nonetheless. I really LIKE twitter. As an often wordy writer, I find it hard most times to fit what I want into the format, but really enjoy the short exchanges with “twitta friends” of diverse backgrounds, ages, and political leanings. Maybe it’s selfish, but I try to steer away from the negative folks out there and spammers fall at the top of my everyday hit list.

Just suffered a first “blocked” twitter today with one of my favorite friends, probably because of the usual paranoia that accompanies these exchanges, everyone looks for hidden agendas (pervs and other creepy crawlers, shame there’s not a remote computer smoker button for those characters, fouling the clear water in which the rest of us are swimming). Still, much here in the way of self-discovery and personal enrichment, one of the best ways I know to get back in touch with your humanity jaded by years of building the protective armor. When in doubt, pass positive strokes, everyone needs them and no one should have to ask.

Blogs for the Seriously Introverted

I always have the feeling that the key for most early bloggers is learning the art of letting go, letting it flow, doing the same kind of things you would do in person. For those of us more *socially challenged*, of course, nothing could be more scary. Why go to the asynchronous expression form to be the way you always are (shy, introverted, reticent, retrospective, …), when what you really want is to release the inner extrovert that has such a difficult time escaping when you are around those who know you as recluse. Filtering the negative doomsayers among your contacts reduces your statistical conquests, but builds more positive outlook and karma, simultaneously maintaining the correct level of trust and ethics.

Thus here it is. Though occasionally too unrestrained in declaring friends you don’t know and conversing via the safe social media format, you nonetheless rediscover a revitalized freedom to express idealistic thoughts that you carefully tucked away decades before. Twittering for the spontaneous shout-out to those stalwart enough to withstand your liberal-conservative mood swings, blogging for more introspective (and wordy) mental traffic. For now at least, good enough.

twitter, trivial tweets and door openings

Still having some difficulty seeing the long-term value of twitter, other than as time-burner extraordinaire. Granted that is is sometimes fun to issue those 140 char or less tweets (something special about seeing that counter hit zero as you finish typing exactly, seems karmic)...

All the other social media have differing and tenacious character, historically logging your journey and evolution, twitter gives that flash-in-the-pan snapshot that feels so...insignificant. Classmates is a commercial gimmick, though good for reestablishing some long-lost contacts, LinkedIn validates your professional presence and connects you to those you want to ping but would not likely email or phone (and your company would not approve), and Facebook is the ultimate equalizer, allowing some freeform social chitchat with contacts you didn't even know you wanted (but really appreciate being there).

Just another stake in the webspace desert...

Trekking across the dunes, on the lookout for cool oases or other places suitable for temporary respite...