Everyone wants to belong to something. To feel they are part of a group of people and accepted for who they are in said group.
It seems to me that social media only accepts the happy, the witty, the helpful, the dreamer and the cool. If you are not part of this group, you will not be accepted by the masses. You may be online and have some followers or some friends, but that’s as far as it will ever go for people like you and I.
Transparency, for the most part, is bullshit in social media. Maybe if your someone like @garyvee or @joemanna (who I have met in real life, played poker with at 4 in the morning and know that even when there is no one around they are exactly the same) transparency is a real thing. But for the rest of us who are not like that, social media is doing more harm than good.
Infact I once heard @garyvee say that “if your an asshole, your intern is flip camming your career down the toilet” or something to that effect and nothing can be more true. If you are not ready to be watched, judged and generally have your entire online life recorded for all time, stay away from social media. Leave it to those people who are perfect.
I have heard @garyveee as well as others thank his parents for raising him “right” many times. What if you were not raised “right”. What if you were raised to swear, speak your mind, stand up for yourself, don’t care what others think, don’t be a sellout, not sell your beliefs or soul, drink, smoke, raise hell, never settle, be yourself and have real and sometimes negative feelings. What then? What kind of place do you have in social media then?
I get why and how social media works for business, I really do. I understand how it has changed the very nature of customer service, marketing and is a huge leap forward for the internet as a whole.
But if you are not a company or a brand but just a regular human being, I would stay FAR away from the online social media world and here is why.
Throughout the course of a typical day for me I may say 80-100 swear words, laugh about something stupid, say a couple of mean things and while I may really not mean them, they float off in to space and 99% of the time are gone for all eternity. That is not the case with social media. In this world, everything you say, do, show, laugh about, share or generally think is recorded for all time. All of your friends, family, employers and potential future employers have access to everything you do or say in this world and they WILL use it to make judgments on you. While you are in this world you must be on your best behavior at all times for some of us, especially when you spend as much time online as I do and generally have as many opinions as I do, this is not an easy thing to do.
I have felt myself under a CRUSHING pressure to watch what I say and how I say it, what I share and who I share it with, what I think, what I look for, who my friends are and what I “look like” online. I have felt like my boss is standing over my shoulder at all times watching every move I make and recording all of my movements, kind of like the movie “Gattica”.
I feel as though I am faced with a choice. Be myself and just don’t care about what others think of me or how I am, or be the person that I think people watching want me to be. Considering the amount of time I spend online and in this space, I feel this is a real decision that I have to make.
For those of you that know me in real life, you know that I am rough around the edges but I generally mean well and am a good guy, but I have found that I take some getting used to for sure. This is a much harder notion in this space because “getting to know” someone is generally out of the question.
I am generally not looking to “crush it” or become the next guru of any sort. I just want to live my life, earn a decent living and be respected in my field and I don’t think that’s too much to ask. I feel however that those types of desires do not fit in to the social media world and are therefore more of a hindrance than anything. Perhaps I just have no place in the social media world and I should exit stage left and spend less time online and more time out in the real world.
I would love to hear your thoughts on how social media interacts with your real life and if you feel the same pressure.
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Hello Joshua, I found your article to be really interesting & truthful. I agree on most things you say, that social media is not for everyone & in my case I even tend to encounter some problems in it. For example, if I feel the need to publish a video, pictures or thoughts about myself, I can’t do it freely because I am constantly thinking whether my thoughts or ideas will affect someone in a negative way. There’s a huge problem because as a person I want to portray the “real” me, but in order to fit in in the social networks, and be accepted between your colleagues & your bosses, you are obligated to edit some key information about yourself. I guess in the long run, what has worked for me is that I had to restrict certain parts of my profiles, so that some people won’t be allowed to see some of my thoughts or ideas, especially when in our lives we encounter “bad days” which are generally filled with cursed words & anger-filled phrases.
And again as you say, if you are not prepared to face registering to a social media and exposing your private life, well, then you are better off not doing it.
Thanks again for your article, take care!
I do not normally post comments on blogs, but after I read your post I have to say, I agree with your perspective. For me, you basically nailed it. I think there is a place for social media, but as a whole it proves sometimes to be more of a liability than a resource.
Great post! Glad I stumbled on to your blog.
I have to agree with this so much:
What if you were not raised “right”. What if you were raised to swear, speak your mind, stand up for yourself, don’t care what others think, don’t be a sellout, not sell your beliefs or soul, drink, smoke, raise hell, never settle, be yourself and have real and sometimes negative feelings. What then?
Personality wise I can be dry and abrupt, aggressive and abrasive sometimes. I too don’t mean nothing by it and am a good soul. Honestly I don’t see how someone can be positive 24/7 to me that would get pretty boring. Whats light without some dark?
I sometimes wonder if most of these people with the exception of a few, are frauds, and they do this so people will friend them and follow them etc, but not being actually real. Emotions all of them make up humans not just happiness.
Great post.