Social (Media) Disease

I suffer from a social medial disease that leads me to expect more than can be delivered. When I see fifty rsvp accepts to a FB invite I learned not to anticipate all fifty showing up but nor do I even expect any of them to show up. I don’t quite get this sort of people pleasing – afraid not to accept the invite but then not caring to show up at all?

Since bumping up to high-speed a couple of years ago I was able to increase my social media presence with FB, then WordPress, and Twitter. All on top of my various email accounts, YouTube, Yahoo Groups. Over 200 FB friends merely means more status updates than I can keep track of, endless invites to events I’ll never go to – but I do say no rather than  fake yes or maybe. That way if I show up it comes as a pleasant (I hope) surprise.

But I suppose that’s better than no on-line presence at all. No publisher will accept an author who does not have a web page of some sort – many publishing contracts now include that as a must. So I’ve done that and have learned how to comport myself. Unlike some I don’t pester my few twitter followers with constant reminders about my web pages or flood their feeds with a endless the same # anything that eventually covers everyone on my list as some do regularly. Keep simple.

My social medial disease immunity has built up some. I know that being on line is merely being on line – it isn’t a real connection with everyone on any given site. Many of us are only connected so we have numbers not friends, so that we have numbers and not even an audience, we have numbers not sales. Such is life.