Social Media: the Point?

A few short weeks ago, people stopped telling me I had to get on Facebook, thank God. Every time a new piece of social media is introduced, I put a curse on it in hopes that it won't take off and I will never have to learn how to use it. It turns out that if you wait long enough, the medium gets stale and no one is impressed by it anymore or is impressed with you for being on it. I figure if I hold out long enough, I will start to appear cool by not using all that stale old social media.

Babs, my alter-ego, is obsessed with social media, and you can see what she's thinking, feeling, eating and excreting by clicking something—I'm not sure what—in the sidebar. As soon as she figures out how to put her networking info in the sidebar. And, also, get some networking info.

I, on the other hand, am virtually invisible on the web. I think it's best that way. After all, I live in an area much like the setting of In Cold Blood, geographically and culturally, and wouldn't want to say anything that might piss a crazy person off, especially since he's probably living in that creepy farmhouse the next square mile over (ie, my next-door-neighbor). That's why I'm making Babs limit her blog content to tech stuff. We're not scared of those Apple-y Googly anything-that-starts-with i- worshiping geeks. Bring it.

There's something nerve-wracking, though, about having pictures, thoughts, intimate details of my life up in various places on the web. I was too much of an asshole in my day, and would prefer to slip off into oblivion, and not be reminded of my assholitude by ex-lovers, ex-friends and my kids. Besides, if you're my age, you really don't want to go back there and see how all those people you couldn't be bothered to stay in touch with turned out. Hint: they turned out to be sociopaths. You have enough of those in your life already. And you certainly don't need any sociopaths who are richer, more successful, and have better looking grandchildren.

It's different if you're young. You don't know you're an asshole, so the idea of letting the world see who you are is not mortifying. Yet.

But if you long to be a part of the social media world, if you are shut-in and isolated and begging wrong numbers to stay on the line and chat for a little while—asking what number they were trying to call, making a lame joke about how they missed it by that much, grilling them on their favorite social media sites—then you might benefit from being on a few social media sites.

Tip #1: Forget about myspace. It died. I don't know why or how; it seemed like just a few short years ago all the cool people loved myspace and hated Facebook and then: Facebook crushed myspace. Something will come along to crush Facebook eventually, we hope, but not soon enough, because Facebook was born evil and will die evil, using, chewing, and spitting out all who were trusting and naïve enough to step into its dark, voracious hellhole.

Tip #2: Start a Facebook page.

Tip #3: Begin tweeting. You do this by opening up a Twitter Account. Then, you come up with hourly quotable words of wisdom, hilarity, or groundbreaking news such as the cute thing one of your nine cats just did. You can link to photos of the cat doing the cute thing, complete with adorable illiterate capshun, and it will make its way to lolcats and bring your cat eternal infamy, which you will find deeply satisfying since your kids are all underachievers and it looks like the grandchildren will be too.Y