Sign Up, Post, Interact, Deactivate

When you first learned about social media, how did you manage to create your circle of friends?

Did you search on Facebook for every person you know and add them? Did you add anyone that has mutual friends or did you add people in the suggestions.

Back in 2004, I already had my first social media account on Friendster. Unfortunately I wasn’t that active because it was not that really trending during those days. Besides, mobile devices were kind of expensive at that time and you will have to go to the nearest internet café to login to your Friendster account.

In my almost ten years of being a Facebook user, I have experienced and learned several things with online socialization. 

When Facebook social media was created by Mark Zuckerberg, it was exclusively only within Harvard University.  (See history of Facebook here.) It never expected to become what it is today.

Social media has brought a lot of good to people. Let’s take Facebook as an example as it is the largest social media site around the world. 

Authorities have been using Facebook to track and hunt down criminals. They have solved a lot of crimes with the help of Facebook. In the same manner, the largest social media has also reunited families that were separated for a very long time. TV programs have been using Facebook too in finding lost family members with the assistance of Social welfare and local governments. On the contrary, social media has been used also by criminals and opportunistic people.

When I first worked overseas, my Facebook notification was flooded with friend requests from different people. Most of them were family relatives. At first they will ask about how I was, when I try to accept their request. But in the end they will ask for some financial assistance. Of course we want to help them too but where were they when I was just in our country.

Do not just accept/send a friend request from anyone unless you know the person very well 

When my contract overseas ended, I applied as a CSR at a BPO company. I remember a former colleague who is now working with another company. One day he texted our boss saying that he can’t make it to work today because he was feeling under the weather. Then a couple of hours had passed, he posted on his social dancing inside a hotel’s lobby. When he reported the next day, he was reprimanded by our boss because my colleagues' activities that day were seen by her.

Do not add your boss or immediate superior on your social. Add them on chat apps only

Why? Because they can monitor your activities and that will affect your appraisal. But with chat, they can only send you messages related to work and not be able to see your post every ten minutes.

Before I finally decided to leave Facebook, I was already inactive for I think three years. I will just log on to my account, scroll to see posts from my friends and or watch shared videos. Sometimes I will upload a photo, put a caption but then after a few minutes of thinking about a short description, I will delete and decide to not post instead.

The reason I left Facebook was that I was no longer happy seeing the posts in my feeds. Some of my friends would share violent videos like shooting and killing then two or three from my circles would share it too. Some friends would post grievances and hatred, post rants and agitation to another friend.  I no longer see good posts from them. 

They forget that the whole world is watching. Remember that when you post a critic you are not just showing it to one person. All of your friends think that your post is about them. 

Think before you post 

Social media is one way medium to use with freedom of expression but some people use it the wrong way. They will just post and post even if their privacy has been open to the public or sometimes post that hit someone even without intention.

Since social media is free to all as long as you have an internet connection, some people create an account even if they don’t know the real purpose of it.

It’s funny that commoners these days buy a laptop or smartphone for the reason of Facebooking or Tiktoking. But if it is going to be used for online business that would be great.

Anyone wants to be noticed, anyone can become an instant internet celebrity and they are using social media as the way to reach people. However there should be limitations when using these social media platforms. We should act accordingly because we never know the dangers it could bring to our circle of friends an the whole community as well.

Sometimes we were happy and enjoyed posting the food that we eat, the restaurants we have eaten with expensive dining but not all of our friends will like what they saw. How many likes do you have for your recent post? Does it tally with the number of friends on your friends list? 

If you want to post your dining or travel experience I suggest you create a blog. This way you can express all your thoughts and insights about something.

You may not agree with me on this but that’s reality and my own experience of using social media. I am an antisocial person because I am an introvert but it doesn’t mean that I don’t have to attend social gatherings. 

So these are only a few things I experienced with that particular social media. If I may have successfully established an online business I guess I will create an account purely for business.

For now my time is devoted to writing and arranging things to create my own website- a personal blog site. I hope I can launch it before the year ends.

So how have you been using social media so far? Share it in the comment. 

Thanks for reading. Ciao!

Feel free to check my previous posts:

Names And Labels Are Nothing But Interpretation

Falls Are Am

Transceiver Devices

Hard Habit To Break

Sharing My Work From Home Experience

Little By Little

Faith Healer: Santigwar

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To all those who support, Thank you!

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Lead image source

Photo credits:

Firmbee.com

Icons8 Team

Aditya Ali