Five tabs are currently open on my Internet Explorer. While I wish I was more sophisticated and could say “Why yes, those five tabs do include CNN.com, USA Today, and The New York Times”, the fact of the matter is, I’m just not that classy yet. In this exact order, my current tabs read: Facebook, Gmail, Twitter, Ning, and US Magazine. Embarrassing? Perhaps a little. Extreme? That’s debatable. Necessary? For me, absolutely. If IV hook ups could carry social media information, I would be walking around campus wheeling a bag full of status updates and tweets trickling into me. My name is Monica...and I’m a Social Media Junkie.
Its hard to imagine being in college without Facebook, or even the internet for that matter. Social media has become such an intregal part of everyday life for me, so much to the point where I find myself sitting here with all those websites open, my cell phone next to me alerting me I have a text waiting, and chatting on Skype with a friend. Though I recognize that this may be borderline grounds for an intervention, it helps to highlight just how important social media has become in my life.
Even though I didn’t jump on the iPhone bandwagon, I joined a different kind of elite world, one that starts with a Black and ends with a Berry. My cell phone is practically an extension of my body, even though I swore I would never be that girl. We all know the one I’m talking about: she’s constantly texting, chatting to someone from her social circle, checking voicemails, or adding on to the seemingly never-ending little black book of phone numbers. That has become me…minus the fact that I just made myself sound like the queen-bee character on 90210.
Not only do I use my cell phone to do the essential functions it was made to do, but I’ve also bombarded myself by having access to the internet on it, having my email linked to my BlackBerry, sending photos and other multi-media messages, taking videos, and chatting over BlackBerry Messenger. I’m constantly tuned in to the social media world at any given moment during the day, even if I don’t want to be.
Sometimes its really tiring to be up to date with everything that’s going on, because lets face it, in the world of social media, things change constantly. Put down the decorations, I don’t expect a pity party. I made the choice to be that connected to the social media world. I could easily hop online, visit attwireless.com and have my internet access and BlackBerry data plan taken off my bill. Even though I should do so since its pretty expensive to keep all those features on my cell phone, there’s a big part of me that loves being so connected.
It’s safe to say that my parents have a hard time understanding how I can be so hyper connected all the time. Scratch that, it’s the understatement of century. It blows their minds every time my siblings and I have our laptops out, chatting on AIM, stalking on Facebook, and yet were also texting or talking on the phone as well. Though it’s hard for them to understand because not only is there a generation gap, but they don’t have the need to multitask like we do when it comes to social media.
The same holds true for my friends and I. Sitting in our apartment, we can all be in the same room, conversing with each other, but there’s always at least one, if not all of us, either on our laptops or texting. Now, this isn’t always the case, but it’s definitely not unheard of. Is it worrisome that our face to face social skills might be dwindling? To me, not so much. I think that even for someone like me who loves the world of social media, nothing can replace in-person socialization.
Even though I have hundreds of friends on Facebook, like many people I know, I don’t consider them all to be actual friends. I would rather have stronger ties with fewer people that I know are true friends, instead of having weaker ties with people I barely associate with except to be polite. If I have a horrible day that I need to vent about, I would rather be able to text a few close friends that I love and trust, as opposed to broadcasting my feelings out on Twitter for the world to see.
However, that’s one of my favorite things about social media: you can choose to use it to whatever extent you’d like. You can keep your social world, and acquaintances, growing, but you can also stay in touch and connected to the few people who really make your world worthwhile.
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