If you have something to say...
Say it on the Huffington Post
If you have something to say...
Say it on the Huffington Post
Ethan Stock lived the Silicon Valley dream. He had recently sold his company to eBay and emanated the tanned skin and relaxed composure you'd expect of someone who just cashed a big corporate check. But I was surprised by what he said next. "Mediocrity is worse than failure, you know?"
I live in a world where I didn't hear someone romantically call me desirable until I was 26. I live in a world where either body privilege or racial privilege is always against me. So I point my camera at my face and I click. I am what some would call ugly, but I don't see it.
With smartphones, people can snap a #Selfie and share it with their network of friends or followers in an instant; even the Clintons are engaging in the trend.
Am I naïve enough to believe the government hasn't being spying on us all this time? No, that's ridiculous. Am I still really mad that it's official? Yes. It's like when your significant other admits to cheating on you even though you already presumed it was the case.
Recently, the little tic-tac-toe of linguistics has made its way into other areas of communication, including places that don't support tagging: Facebook, text messaging, and even casual speech (out loud, one would say, "hashtag: blessed"). Why?
It startles me to even think this way, but let's be honest. Who has time to linger over the daily paper anymore? With our rushed morning schedules, we barely manage to pick it up from the driveway and toss it in the house.
Sunday's 97th Running of the Indianapolis 500 lifted the IndyCar Series to level of awareness rarely seen in the last few years. Social media allowed the drivers to share the highlights, and low lights of the fastest (by average speed) and most competitive (by number of lead changes) race in the 104-year history of the Speedway real-time.
While they're not thrilled with Facebook, teenagers aren't checking out completely. They're just dividing their time among other social networks, like Twitter and Instagram.
Although most lists of "things we can learn from celebrities" include more don't's than do's, there is definitely one thing they can teach us: the art of social media.
Our job as parents is to talk with (not at) our kids and help them develop life-time habits that will protect them in just about all situations online and offline.
It was so easy in the "old days" to receive unwanted spam in your email inbox and just delete it, now spam is a sly thing, it creeps into everything and there are many forms. Social media is now the new spam magnet.
Many of us know we don't have the best phone etiquette, but more importantly, have we ever stopped to think that we're ruining our own life experiences by being consumed by a device in our hand?
By constantly editing (instant "untag," anyone?) and embellishing, we only permit this idealized version of ourselves to rise to the surface, be seen and accepted. What we actually end up feeding is our fear that we aren't good enough exactly as we are.
Some authors, begging for attention, even go overboard and live too much of their lives in social media, recording every twitch of consciousness as if the fate of publishing depended on it. Their neediness -- however disguised -- is epic and sometimes pathetic.
Marketing has never been about magic; neither is social media. Just because you start a blog, that doesn't mean that anyone knows or cares about it. You can tweet all day long, but if no one knows you are tweeting, what good does it do?
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