It’s hard to know what to write when you’ve been given an opportunity to share your thoughts with everyone. With the advent of social media, everyone can share anything at any given time, right? And I say advent, but that’s not really true, is it? We’ve all basically grown up with social media. Anyone in the basic college age range knows exactly what I’m talking about. Who remembers lying about their age to be able to get a Facebook before they were 13? I think we’re one of the first generations to really be dealing with the effects of social media. We’re on the forefront of Vine, social media awards, and the idea that who you are online is also who you are as a person.
I feel like there was this idea that you could be someone else online for a while, back before we really connected to people we knew in real life online. Now, how many times have we been told to double check our Twitters, Instagrams, and Facebooks for anything incriminating or unprofessional? I do. I have two Twitters for goodness’ sake. The idea that who we are online is not who we are in real life is outdated by this point.
Instead, I propose that it is a near inverse now -- who we are online is a concentrated version of who we are in real life. And it can be divided up into categories for consumption. Let me explain. We’ll be examining the three most popular and basic of social media sites for this argument: Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.
Facebook is one of your most clean, professional personas. It’s the one that your mom knows, your grandma knows, your boss might know, and your old teachers or professors might know. It’s the persona that you want to present to the world and the strangers you might encounter in it, as the cleanest cut version of yourself. It’s a condensed version of why you are the best applicant for the job.
Instagram can go a couple of different ways. It can be a companion to your Facebook persona -- nice photos of landscapes, of friends, whatever -- or it can be a take off from your Facebook, where you share what you really want to with your friends. It is, however, another carefully curated way to tell everyone exactly what kind of life you’re living. The only thing that appears is the content you chose -- no more, no less.
I think I could argue that Twitter is one of the purest form of social media. Most of my friend’s twitters are private or hidden behind incomprehensible usernames, our generation’s version of a nom de plume. But here is where the most concentrated essence of a person’s personality comes out -- the stuff they tweet at 4 a.m., at 8 a.m., at 5 p.m., if they tweet at any of those times even. It’s a diary. “A diary filled with inconsequentialities!” I hear you cry. Damn, that’s a fancy word to use when all we’re doing is talking about Twitter. But yeah, duh. That’s the point. You can find out the “important” stuff on Facebook. Who cares. But I think it’s just as important as whether that person retweets deep song lyrics, about how they think they might get promoted at work, or what kind of music taste they think they have. Inconsequentialities are what make up people. You probably like your best friend because of a couple of small things about them. Big things too, probably, but you guys also get a long because she is just as obsessed with "One Tree Hill" or he also hates Kevin Bacon, for whatever reason. Kevin Bacon’s a cool guy, so I don’t know what y’all have against him.
However, it’s easy to do all these kinds of things when it’s just a part of the fabric of your everyday life. We write all the time, now. Every day. That’s literally what Twitter is. But once you’re given a soapbox to stand on and an audience to satisfy, it becomes a lot harder. You’re bombarded with so much content and scours every day that it’s hard to know what to read. But I think we’re also reading a lot more, so that’s cool. What do you do when you have to write for the audience that reads all the time, in a time where our personalities are split among social media? Easy. Write an article about that.
Except you can’t because I just did.
