Let's get all Freudian/Jungian...

How Does Social Media Make You Feel?

     Are you a seasoned "pro" who flies through status updates and shares posts from across the web at the speed of light? Are you busy exploring posts and keeping your thoughts, comments and opinions to yourself or are you huddled in the corner of your online sphere, endlessly mopping beads of nervous sweat from your brow unsure exactly what to post to your timeline, wall or feed? Does online social engagement feel more like the high-school hallway of heaven of your dreams or the hell of your worst high-school nightmare? Are you now starring in the global social show of the century as the popular über-stud or rejected über-cybernerd? Do Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Foursquare, Google+ and other such social platforms excite and inspire your bones or do find them boring, terrifying or brutally annoying? Does Social Web 2.0 signal the righteous emergence of a shifting cultural paradigm for mankind or the-self-serving-narcissistic-end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it?

    Are you checking in or are you checking out?

 

  I've deemed the so-called "experts" of "proper social media engagement" #Gatekeepers on Twitter but they exist across the Web. You'll know them by the arrogant manner with which they abuse these amazing new communication networks to bully newbies while at the same time propagating and proliferating the same old, antiquated, out-dated and quite frankly piss-poor ideas that have existed from the days of stone-tablets and hieroglyphs. They have a vested interest in making their voice the loudest, even if they're saying nothing. To put it in simple Star Wars terms, if the humanization and personalization of Web 2.0 is "The Force" then they are the #EvilEmpire spreading cultural despair and intellectual destruction throughout the social galaxy.

Read the rest of this post »