The Dangers of Social Media
Facebook can be a dangerous thing — especially when family or work colleagues are involved.
From the moment you sign up, your entire life will be open to the scrutiny of every single person on your friends list, ranging from your best friend, to your parents, your work colleagues and even that ‘special someone’ you met on a drunken night down the pub.
This means that every single picture you post, every picture you’re tagged in, every note you write and every status you unleash upon the world has a potential audience that in many cases includes some of the most significant people in your everyday life.
Handled well of course, Facebook is undoubtedly a brilliant tool. Event planning suddenly becomes a piece of cake; sharing photos and reliving experiences, a walk in the park.
But there is a darker side to the social media phenomenon; a darker side to the great exposure Facebook and its ilk can offer. While social media may seem like a harmless piece of fun, too many people fail to understand the awesome power it puts at their fingertips.
With great power comes great responsibility…
Your exposure to the online world can at first seem like a liberating experience. Had a bad day at work? Share it with your friends. Did something stupid? Share it with your friends. Fallen out with someone? Share it with your friends.
Of course many people tend to forget that the people that are exposed to the updates they make on Facebook and other forms of social media don’t just include the handful of people they regularly interact with online. These updates are also shared with the silent majority: the people who don’t post regularly on your wall; the people who don’t feel the need to comment on every photo and ‘like’ every status update.
Forget the silent majority and you can potentially find yourself in a whole world of trouble.
The problem of context
If I were to post a status update right now saying ‘Well, that didn’t go very well’, to the average Joe on the street, my update might seem meaningless. If however you happen to know that today I’ve met my mum’s new boyfriend for the first time, or I just had a job interview, or I just got back from court, or perhaps I just got in from work, then suddenly those few innocent words gain a whole world of new meaning.
People who know me, or who may even only vaguely know me, can very easily reach conclusions that they shouldn’t (because it’s wrong) or worse, reach conclusions they shouldn’t because it’s far closer to the truth than they realise!
See the danger here? And to think the ‘context dilemma’ isn’t anything compared to the next problem in personal social media management…
Airing your dirty laundry in public
Social media can be a danger in one respect because it follows you 24/7. The widening use of smart phones with social media apps makes it far easier to upload photos and make status updates in any number of situations from any number of diverse locations, including that most dangerous of places: the pub.
As we all know, alcohol is a drug rarely conducive to smart thinking. In the age of social media where you hold yourself under voluntary surveillance by the world, why is it that whenever we’re drunk the first thing we want to do is post on Facebook?
Alcohol and social media really don’t mix. At a time when we’re often at our most emotionally vulnerable, sharing our innermost feelings with the world is possibly the worst thing we can do.
Ok so deciding to tell our best friend just how much we love them is possibly acceptable in this situation, but telling our worst enemy just how much we hate them? Telling our family or work colleagues just what we think of them?
Facebook is a melting pot for the emotionally vulnerable, and should be avoided at all costs when drunk or in a fragile state of mind. While it may seem like a great place to get something off your chest, the potential damage that making a post in such a condition can have on your social, or indeed your family life can in some cases, be catastrophic.
The brand of ‘me’
So what’s the solution then, leave Facebook altogether?
Well no. Leaving social media and pretending it doesn’t exist really isn’t a suitable solution in this case. Social media is just too big; it’s just too important to ignore in the modern world, and to avoid it would be silly.
The problem most people have when confronted with dealing with Facebook et al isn’t the social media in itself, it’s the person using it. It is in many cases, what you might call ‘user error’.
People fail to understand that they themselves are a ‘brand’ when it comes to their online presence. Just as Tesco is a brand, just as Microsoft is a brand, just as Facebook is a brand, how an individual appears online has just as much impact on that individual’s life as how a brand such as Microsoft appears and interacts with its consumer on a much larger scale.
The best way to approach social media then, is to consider yourself as a ‘brand’ — the brand of ‘me’.
Remember: everything you do online is being watched. You may not realise it now, and the significance of this statement may not even seem relevant to you for months, or even years down the line, but it is one of the most important lessons you can learn.
Who you are, what you do and how you convey yourself is just as important on an individual scale, as it is to an international brand such as Google. We are in a sense, each of us, marketing directors of our own lives, and until we all realise that, too many of us will fall into the deadly social media trap.
Until next time,
M.J.Ryder