Oh how the world has changed in just a few short years.
In January 2009 I had an old fashioned mobile phone and sent
a few texts. I sent the odd email too. I used Amazon and Ocado, but did little
else online on my old PC. I had no idea what a blog was. My children were 16
months and 4 months old. I was a stay
at home mum and I spent my days chasing my tail. We walked to the shops most
days, with Presley in a pushchair and Cash in a sling. I sat with my babies as
I fed and played with them.
Skip forward to January 2012 and some things are still the
same. I use my old-fashioned mobile phone to send a few texts. I send the odd
personal email. I shop online, not just at Amazon and Ocado, but elsewhere on
the internet for toys, clothes, electrical appliances and things I don’t really
need from Lakeland. I'm still a stay at home mum. My children are now 4 and 3 years old and attend nursery
for 15 hours per week. We walk to the shops and the park. I sit with my
children at mealtimes and play referee when they fight over toys.
The big change in my life is social media. I have a
smartphone and a laptop. I’m a member of Twitter, Facebook, Instagram,
Pinterest, many forums and Blogger. I have over 500 blogs in my Google
Reader. I play Words With Friends.
I could, if I chose to, spend all day every day flitting
around in my online life. Is social media a hobby, that can be put aside, or is it
something more?
How did we keep in touch with our real-life friends before
Facebook? Now we read their status updates and click ‘like’ or comment with a
‘dislike’ as appropriate, but are we really in touch with them or is Facebook a
poor substitute for friendship? When did we last chat on the phone or meet up
in person? And don’t get me started on Facebook’s appaling privacy record…
I sometimes find it bizarre that people tweet about the most
personal of events. They ‘live-tweet’ births, deaths, accidents and
relationship break-ups. It just seems a bit… needy to me. Are we all just
attention-seekers looking for some kind of validation by telling the world that
we’ve just thrown up, or that there are only thirteen sleeps until our holiday
or that we’ve written an unmissable blog post?
Does a tree really fall in a forest if there’s no one there
to Twitpic it and tweet ‘Timber LOL’?
Of course Twitter can be wonderful if you need advice. I
have made some genuine real-life friends through Twitter and hopefully I have
other friends there that I haven’t met yet, but I often feel like I’m wasting
my precious spare time tweeting and chatting when I could be writing or
learning to sew or even – yes, really – cleaning the house. Perhaps I don’t
value these friendships as much as I should? I see other online friends
chatting happily together every day and I feel left out. I wonder if I need to
participate more. I wonder if they see me as their friend even though I don’t
tweet daily. Can you have real friends in social media without that time
commitment or is it a case of ‘out of sight, out of mind’?
I am incredibly nosy, that’s why I love reading blogs and
looking at people’s photographs. I tend to lurk online more than participate (sometimes I simply don't have anything interesting to say) and I notice that some people seem to be online all day every day. Even Christmas
Day. Surely this is the one day of the year when the online world should pale
into insignificance as you spend time with your family. Live. Be in the moment.
Step outside the social media bubble. Catch up with your online buddies another
time.
I did an experiment over the holidays. I didn’t post
anywhere online for 9 whole days. I spent time with my family. It was possibly
made more special and private because I didn’t tweet about it. If I had told
you that I made the best Christmas lunch ever (which I did), would you really
care? I don’t think so. It would have been amusing to tweet that my mum bought
me a meat thermometer for Christmas. You could have replied ‘I think she’s
worried about the turkey ROFL’, but it would have taken both of us away from
our children. I want to remember the look of wonder on Presley’s face when he
came into our bedroom with his stocking on Christmas morning. He was too
excited to speak. I’d have missed that if I had my phone in front of my face,
jabbing away typing ‘7am and I’m the only one awake LMAO’.
I guess, as with most things in life, balance is everything.
I sometimes think that life was simpler before social media. Perhaps I’m just
being anti-social.
What do you think? Do we spend far too long online or is our
real life online now? How do you get the balance right for you?
