01755: Guarding The Social Media Moat

No Man Is An Island by Les Taylor

Since I'm home along right now, I'm digging through our movies to find the odd thing to watch and possibly review later one. After watching Jeff Who Lives At Home, I now watching I Love You Man, which has the weird premise of Paul Rudd being a guy with no guy friends. But as strange as some of the situations presented are, as is the case in movies in general I feel, I realize I sort of relate to the core "problem" that Rudd's character is trying to resolve.

Despite my instincts driven by the introvert side of my personality, I actually make a bit of an effort to try to "meet" new people within my social media spheres. There are times when I feel like I'm being a total social media hermit (or even a real-life hermit), hence my post last week. But at the same time I do my best to limit certain social media platforms to people that I actually know. This is especially the case when it comes to Facebook - I keep that platform strictly moderated given how so many people try to use it for data mining.

My primary discovery platforms are Twitter and Google+, admittedly. Twitter is interesting since my contacts are mostly local and every now and then I chance up the odd queer geek worth talking to from time to time. Google+ is great for interest-driven conversations with great communities built around a variety of geeky topics. Although the process of vetting a new contact and deciding whether or not to actually retain them as a contact is oddly complicated. Maybe it ties back to my lack of patience for people at times. I do add one or two folks that I've never met in person before, but this tends to be a bit of a provisional linkage that can be terminated at any time. I my experience, folks average about a month before I come to a final decision.

Not many make it past the 30 days though. I'm  a bit of a dick like that.

So what's the big lesson here? Does there even need to be any? Well, I guess there sort of is one. Thus far I find that a lot of folks out there aren't quite the people I want to know better. Thus it's clear that social media algorithms for people you may know pretty much sucks and common friends are hardly an indicator of the people that you're actually going to get along with. And so my little exercise with trying to meet new people doesn't exactly result in new friends. I think I just end up finding new ways to feel annoyed by the stupidity of people around me.

Harsh, but hey, that's life.