Justine Manzano 
Social media. We all use it, and chances are, if you’re reading this blog post, you found it on some form of social media. But everyone finds little things about social media annoying. And if other people find it annoying, chances are you’re doing something that sticks in someone’s craw. In an attempt to make all parties a little more comfortable with their time on the good ole’ world wide web, I decided it was time for a survival series about social media.
A couple of weeks ago, I sent out a call on social media (ironic, I know), to find out the most annoying things about social media! And boy did I get a lot of answers. So I’m going to start here.
Topic 1: Boundaries and Anonymity
A lot of people had big problems with the lack of boundaries on the internet, and some for different reasons.
One complaint came from a fellow fangirl. People don’t seem to respect the boundaries of celebrities they have contact with on the internet. I have seen this phenomenon happen myself. Now that celebrities and content creators have twitter accounts and have become increasingly available to fans, fans have started going crazy. There was even just an article about the increasing entitlement of fandom as well as this spot on rebuttal.
Most fans are able to contain themselves and show the general level of excitement and fun that is reasonable when you are able to chat up an actor or musician that you respect. And then there are the bad eggs. The ones that demand contact. We’ve all seen them. “Blanky McAuthor never wrote me back. He’s such an asshole.” No. NOPE. You are not any more deserving of anyone’s time than the ridiculous number of other people talking to them. When you tweet at an author, you have to keep in mind that there is a large chance you are talking to yourself.
But it’s not just that. People do that all the time. It’s the new era of everyone being available to you. At the risk of sounding like the old lady shouting at the kids to get off her lawn, I still remember the days when you had to leave a message on my answering machine and I’d get back to you when I got home. Now, we can be reached EVERYWHERE. And that means people believe we should be.
Take that feeling and multiply it by a thousand for celebrities. Once a fangirl/boy goes off the rails, demanding attention, it has the potential to go to the other creepy place. You have fangirls talking about how much they’d love to have a guy like that actor at home…to the actor. Or worse, his wife! You have this douchenugget who scared the hell out of Amy Schumer by coming up to her in the street, demanding she take a photo with him because “it’s America and we paid for you”.
This is a symptom of a larger problem. ANONYMITY. Online, we get to hide behind a persona. Even if we are relatively close facsimiles of ourselves, we’re not bound to talk about that one time we hormonally freaked out because the pizza store was out of our favorite rolls, or the time you screeched like a banshee because someone spoiled the season finale of a television show. We’re all cooler versions of ourselves on the web. Because we have that internet device between us, keeping us safe from having to face many of the people we’re talking to.
This leads to internet bullying. Being safe behind a computer gives people the boldness to call someone a bad mother, gives them the ability to tell someone to f**k off and die, kill themselves, or more of the terrible things I’ve seen in comment sections on articles. It also gives people with social anxiety the ability to reach out to people they never could have reached out to in person. See? There’s a good side to everything.
So the moral of this story? If you’re using social media for making friends, if you’re using it for promotion, if you’re using it to gain insight into celebrity lives, or if you’re just using it because you’re bored out of your mind, please remember that the people on the other side of the mobile device are people too. They have their own lives, their own schedules, their own insecurities. They aren’t cool computer game characters you can mess with. They are people, and they are affected by what you do.
Always remember that we don’t know what is going through another person’s mind at any given time, and we don’t know what anybody is dealing with. Always give people the space to handle things in a way they can live with, and always be kind.
If you’re confronted by an internet bully impressed by their own anonymity (and probably pretty uncool in the real world), apply the block button liberally. And if someone thinks they’re entitled to an inordinate amount of your time? Dump them. Your life will run smoother that way.
I’ll leave you with that. Stay tuned for next week when I dive into what people think your social media types say about you, and why we share SO. DAMN. MUCH. See you then.