Reducing My Social Media Footprint

Facebook.

Twitter.

Instagram.

TripAdvisor.

Yelp.

YouTube.

Blogger.

Our lives are on display on the Internet 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.  Life on line. Vacations, birth announcements, milestones, family gatherings, good moods, foul moods, break-ups, dinner, hangovers, the list is literally only limited to the activities you can do in one day and post on line. Social Media sites have more members than most countries in the world and the six degrees of separation between people becomes really blurred on a global scale.

As my confidence in using these instant gratification apps decreases, my apprehension in what is on line increases.  Its not so much what is on line; its what's on line and who can see it.  Companies market to me based on the web sites I visit and phishers, scammers, and hackers look to take my information for purposes both criminal and commercial.  

Raising children in this environment is challenging because the technology is so new, and changes/up grades happen so quickly, that people of my generation can barely keep up in order to provide proper parental guidance.  Furthermore, responsible parenting demands that you constantly check up on your kids on line.  Never think for a second that because you tell your kids not to do something on line that they won't just make up some crazy avatar name with you none the wiser.  Our kids live more on line than they do in the present, here and now, and because they don't know where the limits are (because we don't know ourselves) there is a real danger to their safety.  Am I sounding overly cautious?  Am I sounding like an "old fart"?  Maybe.  But I also know I am on to something.

Last Christmas my daughter posted a picture on Twitter that did not belong in the public domain.  While it was adolescent and dumb and ultimately benign, the real message was that photos and other status updates last on line forever .

For-Ev-Er.

I have resolved to reduce my social media footprint.  The other day I checked Facebook and discovered that I had 256 Friends.  Most were people who I connected with in the Facebook boom.  People from high school who I have not seen since graduation from Monroe-Woodbury in 1985.   Some are acquaintances from college.  A lot are former students that I taught.  Most all of them I rarely keep in touch with other than the occasional update comment. 

"Unfriend-ing" people is horrible term for Facebook to use.  Its somewhat cold and very impersonal.  Nonetheless, I have reduced the number to 187 and I am still working at it.  I don't think most people will even realize that we are no longer "Friends".  Some have deleted their own Facebook pages and I never even knew it.  The decision making process for eliminating people from the list is somewhat simple enough; do I have face to face contact with you in 2013, are you family, are you a mentor/mentee, are you otherwise important in my life?  If any of those answers were, Yes, then they stayed on list.

There is more to go, I use other sites for home movies, records of my travel, records of my running. I plan to turn down the amount of those postings, or at least keep mindful of what I am putting out there.

The irony is not lost on me that this blog is another example of my life on line.  The blog is deliberately for friends and family.  I am sure if you are reading this that you are one of those two and not a stranger just passing by.  Its a hard choice to sanitize family events and post them on line or let them remain unfiltered for the world to peruse. 

What a conundrum.  

At least I don't belong to MySpace...