Opting Out of Social Media

Spontaneity is dead. It died when the cell phone became more common than the bicycle and when Google became a noun. What was life like before Microsoft Word became savvy enough to capitalize the G in Google? Our generation is always being told to ‘be unique’. That’s our thing, much like sixties peace and love and nineties slicked black hair. But being an individual is synonymous with loner, we still want to share our individual awesomeness, to interact with our peers in a meaningful way. In fact, with cell phones and social media, we have come to dislike being alone, choosing instead to be individuals with other people who are unique in the same way. We are constantly keeping in touch with a variety of people at all hours of the day. To text or not to text is more of the question. People are connecting like never before, revolutions are begun through internet platforms like Facebook, people can be mobilized at the touch of a mouse, and society is changing in previously unforeseen ways.
What if you decide against it? Though I’m sure most of us are early adaptors, there are the few who decide contentiously or otherwise to opt out of the social media experience. One person I talked to in fact insisted they would lose all shreds of his manhood before becoming a part of the online community that is Facebook.  So I guess to some people this is a bit of a touchy issue. I personally do not have a phone, though I am a Facebook member. Twitter is still a little beyond my understanding because pictures speak a thousand words. Being largely unreachable means I actually have to see a person face to face to talk to them which also means I miss invitations to eat with my friends sometimes. Is that such a bad thing though? I’ve found that in my spontaneous lifestyle it is far easier to get to know more people. Every day turns in to an adventure as I carry out my plans completely alone without a cell phone notifying me of everyone else’s lives…..What will happen next? Being connected to a social network online is a little like sharing and caring intimate moments between friends with everyone on line. The things you post to Facebook, or tweet on Twitter make you seem more open and trustworthy, be it your current love of anime bunnies or your parties with friends last weekend. The scary thing is that those things don’t go away either, and will be read out of context by the entire world the next time Facebook updates its privacy settings without notifying you. Sometimes  the whole thing can be a bother, but that’s okay because at the end of the day we all know that there are lots of friends out there that we can rely on just a couple of clicks away. Instant rewards for all our needs be they beer crawls (which of course this paper does not condone) or homework questions. (Here’s a thought, why do profs have office hours anyways when they could just have a Facebook group?)
For many people, being with a group is about safety as much as it is for personal enjoyment. There is always a lingering threat of the unknown, and the safeties put in place in our parent’s time have largely been replaced by the presence of the cell phone which lives habitually in your pocket. At the cost of only $25 or so dollars, $300 annually, you can feel relatively safe no matter where you are, even if walking back to REV late at night. Emergency medical services will now look for a cell phone as a method of contacting relatives quickly after an accident; they look for ‘Mom’ or Dad’ in the contacts list and call the number.
In a world filled with social media everything is relative. Acts of spontaneity are often co-ordinated rather than just performed and we all know that any person we meet has the option to just go add us on Facebook. To contact someone a number is no longer needed, just a name and some reasoning skills. The world is no longer set up for those of us who choose not to make use of cell phones or computers, land line phones are becoming fewer and fewer. It is a big world out there, but to those who are plugged in to social media, it seems smaller and smaller every passing year. To an extent that is good, but it also makes the greatness of the spaces around us a lot less magnificent.