Control Those Impulses!
Now, when the clever thought occurs to you, do you post it instantly via your iPhone? Do you wait until you get home and then share your undeniable wit with everyone then? Or do you let the clever thought fall by the wayside, figuring that every passing thought is not worthy of spilling to the world? I admit that I usually tend towards the latter course of action, but it takes a certain degree of willpower. Without a certain degree of impulse control, it can be too easy to let the use of social media become an extension of the ego.
This idea that people feel compelled to express every opinion, joke and observation is not just limited to tweeting our physical locations and updating our status constantly. I recently read the blog of the San Francisco Chronicle’s Mick LaSalle- a film critic who I like to read more for his skill with the written word than for this reviews of movies- and he wondered whether the people who leave mean comments all over the web are disproportionately mean individuals, or are normally decent folk who let their id run wild. Anonymity, after all, means never having to own up to your rudeness (ironically, the people who left comments on this blog post were very well-behaved).
This brings us back to the idea of why people leave traces of themselves all over the internet. It’s a medium for self-expression, for connecting to others, and in a way unlike we connect in real life. There IS indeed more anonymity, more immediacy to it all. And yet. Just as we write ourselves on the web, we read others on the web. And just as we can grow tired of the rantings and ramblings of our friends and family- even those we admire; have you ever tried following ?uestlove of The Roots or marketing guru Guy Kawasaki? forget it!- others, naturally, can grow tired of us. If we choose to let our brain leak out onto our feeds at all times.
A bit of impulse control is in order. I don’t tweet from my phone and rarely use Facebook from my phone, precisely to avoid the impulse to share those random brain droppings with the world. I have many amusing thoughts (or at least, they’re amusing to me). But it is rather nice to keep most of them to myself. I see Facebook and Twitter more as fun tools for connecting, personally and professionally, than as a way of projecting myself to everyone. Ick. I still cherish some sense of privacy (you’ll notice this blog is NOT under my real name). Is it possible to impose some level of control on our more social, more connected online selves? Let’s hope so.
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