A brief look at the status of social networking sites over our diaries.From Twitter to Facebook, to Bebo and even blogs - all are platforms where people pour out their thoughts. What is happening? "In the bath" says a Twitter user. What is on your mind? "we broke up today (sobs)" says a Facebook user.
Hundreds, thousands and even millions of people see the kind of things we post on social networking sites on a daily basis. So the question is: "Are some certain things meant for our personal diaries?" Day by day people get a lot more personal and take to social networking to pour out these things, things which would have been better if we kept them to ourselves or those very close to us instead of a fair portion of the world.
A lot of us are used to online chatting all thanks to the advancement of technology and we share a very good relationship with the keyboard, so we ask: "Why put pen to paper, why do we bother confiding in something that cannot talk back to us?"
The truth is that everybody wants to belong somewhere. While some people might still keep diaries they will have no problem with answering Twitter's question: "What's happening?" or Facebook's question: "What's on your mind?" Yes, the questions do seem nosy and it is like they want to pry into your minds and extract all the information they can for a large population. On the bright side, you won't have to worry about people breaking in to your diaries to know what is going on in your mind and your lives! It is all there, well, for those of us that are brave enough to post certain things.
Some may argue that social networking sites are dangerous and others say that they help us connect in a way we wouldn't have dreamt about 20 years ago. Twitter, for example, is quite popular with celebrities who use the platform to connect with their fans and at the same time make the news for some certain stuff they tweet. We can argue that a lot of them have turned Twitter and even Facebook into their public journal or diary. Let us face the fact; Twitter is the only place where you can follow people without any risk of a restraining order. Good news for obsessed fans!!
To sum up, let us all take a look at what we post and what others post. I am sure we will come across some stuff that we really should not know and some that well, we would not mind knowing.
Fatima Joji
@fatima_joji
Homepage image by trekkyandy on Flickr.