Social Media: Why hide?

Through social media, you can get a good glimpse of a person. I am no exception of this. Personally, my social media account is full of recipes and sharing the occasional meme or funny video. When I do make posts, it’s usually about my work, my photography, or my dogs.

My networks and sub-networks can be categorized in a few ways. I have a bunch of friends from school (both high school and from NC State). I have a few from my old neighborhood. Some have been from jobs. Many are family (my husbands, as well as my own). Some are my photographer friends who I network with and learn from (some from real life and some who I’ve connected through online). I also have friends from karaoke (my family’s business), and from Krav Maga. When I was engaged, I was in a facebook group of brides where we traded advice. There was about 20 of us who got married and stayed in contact, so we formed a brides to wives group. We added each other on facebook and have become pretty good online friends, despite never meeting in person. I am friends with a few of them, and they are friends with others in the group, so we are connected that way. My family is connected with a lot of the karaoke people because it’s our family business and we run into most of the same people. My family also is friends with some of Rick’s family since they met a lot of extended family at the wedding. Other than that, my groups stay relatively separate, although, I have lived in Raleigh my entire life, so occasionally random friends will know someone else I know from a different group. I do end up seeing a lot of the same stuff on my feed, probably because of living in the same area and the whole “seven degrees of Kevin Bacon” thing. I’m sure most of my friends are within 4 degrees of each other, probably less.

I have a tendency to like stuff related to Krav Maga. I also like a lot of political posts and share plenty about gun ownership. I also will share basically anything recipe or pet related. The other people who post them are people who go to my Krav school and try to eat healthy or share stuff about Krav or protecting yourself. I’m not sure if I’m influenced by people on social media, as I feel like I kind of have my own identity these days (it’s amazing how getting married will make you stop caring about being likeable or masking yourself), so I’m pretty confident and comfortable in who I am.

I would have to say again, the people who like and comment on my posts are usually the people who like eating healthy (i.e., my work out friends, not my karaoke friends). Also, everyone seems to enjoy cute animals. My parents usually like the stuff I post, too, but I don’t feel like they count. To be honest, I usually like, comment on, and share things so I can find it easily again for myself, so I rarely pay attention to who shares my posts. I definitely don’t see myself as the nucleus of any group. I’m more of the one in the middle that connects between several groups.

I honestly don’t really care if facebook uses my information. If they can better the world with my data, then I say do it. I wouldn’t necessarily put my medical info on there, but I don’t care that it knows my gender, political affiliation, religious affiliation, likes, etc. From the Atlantic article about going “behind the machines backs”, I gathered that people try really hard to lower the data that they give by screenshotting or not linking back on twitter. This seems like way too much work, and personally, I don’t care enough to hide myself. I don’t feel like I post anything absurd or crazy.