An irritation called Facebook.

For the past few weeks I have started to get (and subsequently increased to magnitude last seen at  a Justin B concert) irritated with two things, one people (what else?!) that are so engrossed with themselves that they are seriously giving the mediocrity principle a sombre run for money. Maybe I am just getting grumpy, but they always seem to “we just have to meet up” and when we eventually do, they actually share your ideas you provided them a while ago “isn’t that a great idea?!” (ever had that?). So just how could you have missed that I shared this “idea” with you before? So I politely smile. The fact that this happened twice made me seriously reconsider the “friendship” and definitely sharing myself to others. The Second thing that has started to irritate me (Aldus not to a level of a Justin concert) is the whole Facebook / social media. I am the first to admit that I am somewhat of a social media prostitute. I would randomly accept any “friendship” requests on Facebook, and grew my “friend” list to a whopping 800 plus. I of course don’t know 800 plus people personally. But this was I suspect a paradox to the fact that my own real world friends just don’t post that much on Facebook to warrant my daily first-thing-in-the-morning fix of who did what. The thing with Facebook is that it’s pretty much a meat market place (or maybe I’m mixing with the wrong crowd?) and more and more a pretty dull space. Do I really want to tell people what I made for supper? Is my life so random that I first have to tell people what I am doing on Facebook? Do they actually care? Is Facebook an acceptable communication medium? What happens to all those “petitions” that people post on Facebook? You would think that the world would be a pretty much changed place with the amount of petitions and the like floating around. What also made me re-think the whole social media route was in fact an incident that made me sit back and reflect. Previously (and the stress is on previously) I published my personal detail (as in my mobile number and other) on social websites (not the most brightest thing in retrospect) in any event, I received a phone call from a person at 2 in the morning. I did not recognise the number so I let it ring and went over to voicemail. The next morning I had a very rude and very disturbing “swearing at me” message on my voicemail from a person stating that I was basically the low life of life for not answering the call. This fascinated me. I save the number and decided to do some investigation. Two days later I messaged the number (sneaky sneaky) and I basically figured out that this person found my number on  Facebook (random friend add) and wanted to “have a chat” at two in the morning and when I did not respond was then promptly verbally abused. This is probably the extreme but got me thinking about the effect of social media in general on our lives and the massive security risk that it poses.  Not just physical security (hey everybody I am leaving my house for a holiday now, scroll back to see where I actually live as pinned by Google maps and help yourself since you know I am gone for two weeks) but also a very real danger on our intellectual capital (hey world I just had this great idea and I am sharing it randomly, or I took this really cool picture, feel free to copy and paste the image, enlarge it and re-sell it). We easily splurge whatever is on our minds to whoever wants to listen. We have finally reached a point where our narcissistic tendencies far out way our social interest. We don’t care about others; we simply would like to do our own advertising. We have free web space in the form of Facebook and the like. We want the world to know that we have arrived. The problem is just people might not be interested in what you are up to. As educators I believe it is our responsibility to provide learners with a realistic respectful view on social media and how this might affect them. Anyway let me go and check who is doing what for lunch today on Facebook.