Self Centered Censorship

January 27th, 2012

At no other point in history have we been so comfortable sharing our lives with complete strangers. Being comfortable is basically akin to being at home – and when you’re at home, you let your guard down.

I don’t have a censor when it comes to tweeting, I’ve become so comfortable with sharing what I do and the thoughts that I have with the people that follow me — 99.9% of which I’ve never met — I’m not able to step back and think, “should I really tweet this?”.

Of course I should, off it goes. Bang!

Twice, these quicker than instant updates have got me into trouble, the first time was when I was DJ’ing – I moaned about the club I was DJ’ing in for changing their habits and not sorting the DJ out with drinks, I also mentioned that the air conditioning was set to freezing — I realise I sound like a complete diva whilst typing this — one of the bar managers read my tweets and stormed down to the booth, handed me a couple of cans of Red Bull and had a go about my updates. I didn’t DJ for them again after that. The next time it happened was only a few days ago, I’m still in the middle of the issue at hand, so I can’t really go into details, but it’s a frustrating situation for me and I discussed my frustrations to a couple of friends on Twitter. Suddenly my already faltering relationship with the other party goes from bad to worse and I’ve (probably) made things harder to get an outcome I’m happy with. Keyboard warrior? No. Keyboard suicide!

So, is this just me, or will everyone experience this in their social networking lives?

Some people will be able to filter out the update that could get them into trouble, lucky them. Others will spill everything into their updates and will be lucky if the update passes by without the wrong people noticing, lucky them. Others won’t be so lucky, that update will hit an unfortunate target, and there’ll be collateral damage.

So, to protect myself from myself, I’m going to have a look at the way I socialise online, and look into making some tweaks that will help me share relevant content to relevant people.

Twitter

Twitter is the network that’s got me into trouble, so it is the one I need to manage most. It is so open, anyone can view everything I tweet, I don’t want to make my profile protected as I connect a lot of services to my account and fear these wouldn’t work as well – or work at all. So I’m going to filter myself and use an alternative network for my personal life; Path.

Path

I signed up to Path when it was first released back in late 2010, I created one post and never used it again – no one else I knew was using it. This now seems the perfect place to document and share my personal life, the things I do (and think) away from Web Design, WordPress, my little side projects and my DJ’ing. I’ve been using it for a day now and I love the feel of the iPhone app, I love the timeline as you scroll through updates, I also really like the filtered photographs – Instagram could be in danger here too. Foursquare integration on Path also knocks that app into touch. It’s still a little quiet in my stream, I’m going to invite a couple of close friends to see if I can get them to sign up, but either way I’m going to stick with it because I’m hoping to create what the creators of this network want for its users;

“The smart journal that helps you share life with the ones you love.” Path.com

Empty Rooms

Someone commented in passing recently, that I have a rather substantial amount of social network icons in the header of my website and that “you can’t possibly use them all”. Well, I use most of them, but others – I’m not very active on at all. So I’m going to put my eggs in only a couple of baskets. Google Plus; it’s too much like Twitter for me and I would only duplicate my updates if I tried to use it, the circles could help me – or they could just confuse me further! LinkedIn; I’ve never got any value from being on there, I’ve tried – it’s just all too serious, and all the information is available on my website anyway. Zerply is very similar to LinkedIn, as it tries to tie your work life into a CV like profile page, but it’s also very similar to About.me in that it gathers together all your social links. Tumblr is a tricky one, my blog on there is just posts of things I like, things I’ve found that are interesting; images, articles and websites. I go through stages of adding loads of content, then months at a time go by where I forget that it’s even there. I’m going to start working on a fresh design of this website very soon and I’m tempted to envelope those kinds of posts within this blog, there would be lots of benefits – more content on this site, regular short updates nestled within the usual longer blog posts that occur less frequently. Flickr; I don’t use this as often as I used to, Instragram takes up most of my photo browsing and sharing mojo, and I’m not taking as many ‘nice’ photos with my proper camera anymore – maybe this will pick up again once I get my hands on an iPhone 4S in the next month or two – as that will probably rival the quality of my 3 year old point and shoot Canon, so I’m not loosing Flickr just yet – I might downgrade from Pro though at the next renewal.

Conclusion

When I read back my hopes for 2012 blog post from earlier this month and especially my review of 2011 post, all I seemingly want is things to be a little more straightforward. Social networking is a large part of my life, it is something I really enjoy and I’ve got loads out of it, but it can dominate a little too much of my time. Making things simpler, having less networks to keep an eye on will give me more time to concentrate on creating better content for the ones I have remaining, and maybe a little more time for people — and my work — in the real world too!

Tags: about dot me, censorship, filters, flickr, linkedin, path, twitter, zerply