This is what I call as the “21st century obsessive compulsive disorder” or our endless love affair with social media, if you may. With the acceleration and proliferation of social media in our lives, merging any daily activities that you can think of and then sharing it with your network – for example, buying things online, there is a ‘like’ or ‘tweet’ button to show your friends and the world that these are the things that you like – is this necessary? I found it impossible not to develop an endless love affair with social media as we spend more time with it, involving it in every single part of our lives.
But how much is too much?!
Have a look at the examples below:
First example, you may not realize it but busily updating your Facebook stats while you were out and about might come across to people as rude or ‘disconnected’ from reality – as you don’t actually live and belong to a 2D planet called ‘online social space’ that exists just on a flat screen. So you don’t have to update every single detail about your life to people.
Second, for those of you food lovers who started taking pictures as soon as the food came to the table and no one was to touch it until you had snapped a few pretty pictures with Instagram while your mates were starving and had to hold themselves back for you – you have a problem.
Final example, replying as soon as new tweets came through from strangers you didn’t really care about while you’re catching up with your friend – well, that’s like chatting to strangers in the middle of the street while your poor friend was being left behind, that’s just not very nice is it?
All of the above are just a few of the many, many examples of quite extreme cases caused by the obsessive compulsive disorder use of social media but I see more and more of it happening.
So if you found yourself fitting into one of the examples above, how do you solve this? Well, you can still be an avid social media user but be wary of what was happening in your surroundings and only made a couple of updates where necessary.
After all, your life doesn’t just revolve around your online existence and at the end of the day; social media is merely just another form of communication, not means to an end.
Beatrix Tanuwidjaja
Starcom
Beatrix works for Starcom as one of the Digital geeks, who is interested in the latest trends, innovations and developments of online technology which shapes the way we connect, communicate and transact forever. Besides this blog, she could also be found tweeting as @Beatrixtj and on LinkedIn as Beatrix Tanuwidjaja