One of the reasons I joined Facebook, and then embraced social media, was to get away from all the “chain-emails” that so many friends were forwarding on and on and on and on… I wanted to connect with people online in real-time and find out what was happening as I typed. I was sick of getting unoriginal content from people who were too lazy to write their own thing and would rather cut and paste or forward on something that someone else sent them. In real-life, offline this is called pla-giar-ism - get it?
The final straw came when I put together an email of my own composition, urging people to think before they forward, as well as explaining how missing persons emails were often forwarded long after the person had been found, and that postal chain letters and emails promising wonderful things would happen if you sent 10 more on – are all the same – NOTHING EVER HAPPENS! Do you know what happened after I sent this email out to my address book? A few months later it came back to me – badly edited and covered in ‘penguin-feet’!
Call me kooky – but I’m the kind that craves the news, not just the headlines, but what’s going on in my friend’s worlds around me. I have a desire to network like-minded people and find out about what they do and how they live and conduct business. But now it seems because everyone, almost, has migrated to Facebook, they’ve brought their old habits with them. Now instead of forwarding emails, people are just copying each others posts and engaging in the same wild goose chase of uninformed social information, just in a different place.
For example – the latest thing of changing your Profile Pic to a cartoon character in protest of child abuse. Did anyone think to check the source? And now we have the allegations that this originated from a paedophile with bad intentions. Are we really that surprised? Or what about the passive aggressive status updates (again all cut and pasted) that tell us what 97% of the people won’t do and what 3% will do and then wrap it up in some charity? If you really care – then put your money where your status update is!
Again, call me odd, but when I receive a suggestion or a link, I go and check it out for myself. When I receive ‘junk’ advertising in the mail I don’t automatically respond – and the same goes for my email inbox and hence any other ‘invites’ or ‘suggestions’ I receive via social media networks too. I just thought this was plain common-sense. Why would I get online to become better informed and
not be thoughtful and proactive about it?
For instance, on Twitter, one can Re Tweet. However, there is a lot of blind Re-Tweeting going on which leads to false rumours starting which leads to furore and then calls to start banning things unnecessarily.
The beauty of being online and digital is that it is a quick, easy and effective method of communication worldwide – but people please don’t let it make us lazy! I want to know what YOU think, not what someone else said.
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