As a child of the digital age I blog, I’ve had a livejournal, myspace, bebo, and so on. I have a personal website (http://www.mattfricker.co.uk) a twitter, a facebook, many facets of my life in fact, it could be argued, have a presence on social media sites, but is this a good thing?
I personally share a number of things via social media, including blogging (which is what I’m doing here) some I will promote for all to see, other blogs that I write, I keep for me alone, (It’s a diary, just not written in longhand you see).
Twitter is one of the many social networks I have a small presence on, and with Twitter, I can discover what people really think, or at least claim to really be thinking.
Recently, we’ve seen a great example of the effect that Twitter can have on social media and mass media as a whole, as former Big Brother contestant Kenneth Tong decided to launch a campaign promoting “managed anorexia”
The move, which Tong has since claimed was all a hoax, highlighted the full power of social media outrage, as everyone from teenagers in remote parts of the world, to worldwide celebrities including Rihanna let Kenneth Tong know how deplorable they felt his actions were.
At the time of writing, Journalist Johann Hari has recently released an in depth interview he conducted with Tong, which suggests that, sadly, Kenneth Tong wasn’t actually carrying out a hoax at all, but was very, very misguided. (The Johann Hari article can be found at the following link http://johannhari.com/2011/01/12/kenneth-tong-the-interview)
So the question I’m asking is, should we blog our every thought?
I asked this very question on twitter, so far, I’ve only had two response, one read, “I think that exposing your entire life on social networking sites is asking for trouble. People WILL use it against you”
The other said, “Everyone shares everything online now, the internet gave everyone a chance to be heard, which is both a good and bad thing”
While I’m happy to share some things, (such as my thoughts on Rooney Mara as The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, Lisbeth Salander) there are other things I won’t share openly on social media (basically, anything I deem to be a deeply personal thought).
Others will share every aspect of their life though, from how they’re feeling, to where they are, to what they’ve just done.
In the end, only you yourself can judge how much you choose to share (if anything) on social media, but are you doing more damage than good by sharing information with anyone out there who chooses to look in on your life, even in a digital sense?
