Nanny Goat Park Children's Wild Flower Project
Why am I going into the blog arena with such openness ?
For the first time in our media concious lives 'we' are the centre of the media storm, every single individual has at last , truly gained their fifteen minutes of fame and are able to orchestrate the music, design the page we appear on, write the script and fill out the Desert Island Disc list to perfection.
Psychologically our very peer driven world is set up to believe something 'just because it says so in the blurb'.
The number of followers you have on Facebook, the amount of Tweets you make on Twitter or again the followers you garner. Have become the criteria you are evaluated by.
The images you post on any of the social media sites have become part of many interview processes, are you rolling round drunk in any of them, have you posted something offensive in the PC rule book. What was it you did last Summer? Are those people your family !!!
Social Media has become the standard by which you gain a Social Proof which can as a consequence influence your business world, you working life, your social life and all because of numbers.
If you have hundreds or thousands of likes / favourites/ followers on individual sites then the 'peer pressure' activates its unseen presence in the onlookers thought process.
'Well, (you say to yourself) they must be good if they have ten thousand followers' and you click on like /follow to be part of the 'in' crowd. Not everyone is driven this way, but a substantial amount of people ARE and as a result you can see fame accrued simply because someone has so many followers. Not especially because they are particularly good at something, but because they know 'how' to gain followers.
Every post you make, every image you upload has a resonance to an individual, for some an image may be delightful, for others offensive but what it will do is inspire a click or a moving on moment..either way, you have influenced someone's thought processes and as 'they' see your name more often, they will eventually come to 'know' you.
They will learn your views on partying, politics. art, humour, music,problem solving,quotations, just by scrolling through your tweets they can discover so much about your personality and that scrolling through' is something modern day employers actually do these days. So many people can and do access your social media site, even the Government and some departments access Social Media Sites to obtain information, to discover your whereabouts or your working schedule.
It all becomes part of you, the individual and it is gaining in importance as more and more new inventions and twists on the social norm become added.Each new application from the new I Phone to the Google Glasses is designed to let you and others be 'in the know' about literally everything.
There are of course dangers, I highlighted one of the dangers in my blog about the Internet Lover the Thief of Hearts on the Silver blog (see links, but thieves of the more materialistic kind access 'us' too, as do other darker forces. Recently a whole series of you-tube uploads arrived to inform us all that uploading your child's image via a mobile phone could lead to the child being identified right down to the school they attended. It isn't fantasy, it is, unfortunately fact. That isn't the whole of it all but it is a growing trend in our modern world to access information on anyone, irrespective of their own preferences. Selecting the right settings, being aware of what we post, tweet, write, has become a real need.
Individuals now have to consider if they post some things, will it affect their job application, Uni application and so on. We are becoming more aware now than ever before that we really are what we tweet and that post you made when you were in a bad mood had better disappear, those horrible pictures of you falling out of the taxi with your friends when you had all had too much vino had best be deleted.
For me, my current situation is probably one of the most dangerous a woman can suffer. I am alone, I am technically homeless, I am elderly, I am disabled, and I feel pressurised to 'be like everyone else' and I don't know how. I can't 'go into a refuge' they don't take dogs, and I am not having my poor boys put to sleep for the convenience of whatever organisation wants to pop me into a nice file/box/category...I can't do that, they are completely reliant on my looking after them, I took them on knowing that, so I am going to fulfil my obligations for them, and if that means we sleep in the car, then that's what we do. But to make things safer, easier, I decided that being as public as possible would at least give me a little edge, I am traceable, see-able. albeit on the internet, but if something goes wrong...I will have left a trail of posts and tweets.
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what we are all now having to learn is :-
we really are what we tweet......
