Social media as therapy: a bad idea…

As much as I hate to admit it, I live quite a bit of my life aboard social media.

I’m a member of Facebook, X, and Tiktok.  The current big three of social media. On Facebook I’ve been there for almost 20 years and have about 1200 friends or as they say in the current vernacular “followers”. Facebook separates France and followers but suffice it to say I’ve got quite a few.

I have more on TikTok, the one TikTok, it’s a lot more nondescript if anything good can be said about Facebook is that you can search out your individual friends based on your life and how you’ve encountered those people. You don’t have that luxury onTiktok.  On that platform I have over 10,000 followers.

You learn a lesson very quickly when you engage on social media. Basically you’re in control of what information the rest of the planet gets to see.  You can say as much or as little as you want to.  

What you DO say, belongs to the rest of the world once you post it, and fairly or unfairly, you are judged upon what you say.

Or to borrow a sentence from the Miranda warning “what you say, there can be used against you“.  For some it takes a while for that to sink in.  

It can be very therapeutic and its way, I suppose. Journaling is an art form is on life-support. I won’t call it dead, but seeing that blogging, like I’m doing now, is a lot more immediate and requires a whole lot less effort. It can be said that it is dying.

But as I said, above, a lot can be determined about you through what you post online. It is not in any way, shape or form, fair.  

I can attribute at least one of the jobs that I’ve lost over my career to me, saying a few too many evil words on social media, and I’ve heard tell of many a relationship, and even the marriage, or to end based upon social media activity.

Recently, here in Tulsa, there has been evidence of potential violent threats based on social media posts so you have to be careful about what you post online.  It can be perfectly innocent to you, but it can be easily misconstrued, and people can miss use it to their hearts content.

So why am I seeing all of this?  I think that we should come back off of our computers and talk to each other about things.  Face-to-face.  Don’t just throw it up on a social media site and let the world debate it.  Everybody is different, I realize, and may be in the transaction you feel better, but I think it will do people a whole lot more good just to talk about it.

Anyway, that’s a random thought and also a preface.

You’ll come to that here soon enough.