30 Day Writing Challenge

So my daughter posted a meme with a 30 day writing challenge. I've decided to go for it, although I may not post my writing every day. Looking through the daily topics I can see that some won't be very post worthy, some I may not want to post and some I may substitute with my own subject sentence.

In any case, here is Day 1

Five problems with social media

Just five?
Oh well, I guest that we each get to choose five from the many problems with social media.

1) For me, one of the biggest problem is that social media keeps a record of your "friends" even though such a real life record doesn't exist.

If I don't know you well and don't want to count you as a friend, in real life I don't have to. We can still acknowledge that we are acquainted. We can still be civil or friendly. It doesn't mean we are really friends. The thing is, we never really say, "You're not my friend!"
Social media isn't the same. I have to decided to "friend" you or not. Or worse...to actually "unfriend" you. I think this causes bad feelings where no maliciousness was intended.

2) Even though we know that others are going to read our posts and that our posts say things that we would never say to the face of some of our readers (while we would gladly discuss them with others), we tend to feel isolated and safe in our homes behind our keyboards or phones and we write things that may hurt many of our "friends."
Then we get our feelings hurt when they "unfriend" us!

3) Face it, social media is a time suck! You don't mean to be on it for hours on end, but you are. You read and re-post articles and later find out that most of them aren't even true. Hours of your life spent wasted!

4) There are so many different venues for social media.
Back in the day, it was just My Space. Now there are social networks for everything and you can link your accounts together.

I probably spend more time on Twitter than any other venue. I often read through my Facebook feed, post some comments, but most of my Facebook posts are actually links from Twitter, Instagram or LinkedIn.

5) And of course, the downside of the free access is all of the ads!
And because of the smart programming, the ads are targeted by key words in your own posts so they are things that are of interest. It's kind of creepy that the ads on your feed are about things that interest you.

I know that there are many other problems with social media. These are not the worst problems; they are just the ones that popped into my pea sized brain as I clicked away at the keyboard this morning. Now it's time to refill my coffee cup and get on with the day.

I hope that your day is a good one.
Feel free to share one or your problems with social media.

John <><