Little to No Little Postings

One thing that has always baffled me is why some people make the conscious decision to post every little thing that they are doing while others choose to post barely anything. For those that choose to posting everything they do, I’ve always wondered why. Let’s face it, nobody really cares that much about why another person is doing. They might say they do but they really don’t because chances are they are too busy dealing with own lives to really and truly care that much about someone else. There’s also the fact that this person isn’t a celebrity or anything. The only people who I feel would geger feel the need to post so compulsively would be a celebrity. Despite the fact that they are just regular people who can act well, sing well, dance well, or are are just simply famous to be famous and don’t have any true talent  (Kardashians) are really the only type of people that other people care enough about to want to hear everything that is going on in their lives. I personally am not one that is keeping up with the Kardashians... (see what I did there?) because I don’t care enough about them. They are completely talentless and I really don’t understand why they’re even famous. Then again, you really don’t need much talent to become famous. Also, nobody’s life is truly that interesting that they’d even get enough likes for every excessively useless thing they posted.
I have a “friend” let’s call her Melissa. Now you see Melissa is the kind of person who feels the compulsive need to post about anything and everything that is going on in her life. From every movie that she watches, to every time she is getting her nails done, or even when she is going out to eat. I used to follow her on social media (because I was an idiot but fortunately I have since learned from my mistakes) but because I didn’t want my newsfeed to consist of the majority of her useless postings I made the wonderful decision to unfollow her. And let me tell you that was one of the best decisions of my life. I no longer have to see her face or her stupidly useless and boring posts. Now I can spend my time looking at postings of other friends that I actually care about. Honest to god though, stalking her wouldn’t be too difficult because not only does she post everything she also posts the location of where she is at too. However, it probably wouldn’t be too hard to find her if she went missing. All we’d have to do is follow the trail of postings. The worst thing she did was post the results of the olympics. She doesn’t live in the states so she would get the results before us and ruin it for everyone here. Needless to say, she’s not the sharpest knife in the drawer. Anyways, I reached out to her as well as some other people and asked why they chose to post more often than others. The most typical response I got for the oversharers was that they just simply liked to let people know what they were doing. For the nonsharers the general response was that they either forgot they made a social media account or that they didn’t feel the need to share what they were doing all the time and they preferred to be in the moment with whoever they are. Some people will post the 30+ pictures they took while on vacation while others you wouldn’t  even know they went on a vacation. Some people are more private than others and I get that.
With some people, it’s not that they are constantly posting about what they are doing but it’s every little complaint and inconvenience that occurs in their day to day life and it gets to the point where their posts turn more and more into them whining and complaining about trivial things. Those are equally annoying because that person never has anything good to say and all you hear from them is whining and whining about this and that and it doesn’t take long for that to get annoying. We all have little inconveniences that occur in our day to day lives but some of us are smart enough to not post about every single one of those things and we just deal with whatever crappy thing we are dealing with. If I were to post about every little annoyance that happened in my life, I would have a lot of annoyed friends. When asked, most people said they do it with the hopes that other people will be able to relate and empathize with what they are going through just so that they know they are not alone in whatever they are going through.
Another type of oversharer are the types of people who are constantly sharing some meme or funny video they saw and they only share things but never actually post anything about their lives. These types of people could easily share 15+ memes or videos in a very short time span. The people I’ve noticed who are guilty of doing such things are grown adults who have jobs and kids. It truly baffles me how exactly these people have all this time to be sharing things. Because sharing this much stuff means that they must have a lot of free time on their hands to be scrolling through all that to be finding all those things to share. I asked why they did that and most people said it was because they didn’t feel as if they had anything interesting enough to post about but they want to post about something so instead they just share like 1,000 things per minute. I guess I can understand that it’s just that sometimes it would be nice to hear about what’s going on in that person’s life. If that person were to be murdered and the police were to question their friends to ask about what that person was like, I swear the only thing I’d be able to tell that cop would be that I don’t have any idea because all they did was share memes all day long so as a result I never was able to learn about who they were as a person. What a horrible thing a cop would have to tell the parents.
While those may all seem unrelated, one thing that they do have in common in the inability to be in the moment and the compulsive need to post. With the oversharers, how annoying would it be if every time you hung out with someone they HAD to post about it. Like the person can’t even go to brunch without letting 100 other people know that they are drinking mimosas. With the whiny people, they are unable to be in the moment & just deal with whatever is happening. It’s like oh having a mental break down, panic attack, or anxiety attack? Oh wait, gotta post about it. And with the meme people it would be pretty annoying if you were with someone and all they did was scroll through their phone because “gotta share the perfect video or somewhat relatable meme.”
I hate all these types of people which is why I chose to greatly reduce the frequency of my postings for fear of becoming one of those types of people.

Crowdsourcing

Crowdsourcing has become quite popular over the years. Especially with the rise of social media and the need to get data and input from many different people at once. I myself am totally for crowdsourcing. Me personally, I think it is a great way to get different perspectives and opinions on a topic from many different people. I myself am guilty of crowdsourcing; especially on facebook. When it comes to the nail polish and make up department, I am clueless. I don't know how to do makeup nor do I know which color nail polishes coordinate well with certain color dresses. Which is why when I have attended two weddings where I would have to dress up and look all nice, I turned to facebook to ask which color nail polish I should get. Sure it's not a serious question but it is a simple question that many different people can answer which allows me to eventually come up with a solution. By asking people's opinion on something such as nail polish color, it gives people the impression that I care about their opinion. I do care about certain people's opinion but not as many as some people may think. I have seen the good that crowdsourcing can do. Take for example Buzzfeed. One of the Buzzfeed posting concerns unsolved mysteries. Some include Jack the Ripper, missing people, spontaneous combustion, and the famous JonBenet Ramsey case. Most of the videos end with different theories of what happened to these people. What Buzzfeed unsolved has people do is post questions or comments on their social medias. What that allows is new theories to arise, possibly leading to more clues, and a high chance of the case being solved or maybe even the ability to point things out they may not have been caught initially. Maybe one day these videos will help solve one of these cases. Anyways, there is also the cases of where crowdsourcing has really helped people. There is this group of biker gangs that block the westboro baptist church. That way when the families are grieving their loved ones, they don't have to see that awful "church" picketing the funeral of their loved one. That I think is a great example of crowdsourcing doing good. It probably started from someone with an idea t shield families,  other people jumped on that idea because it helped people and now there is a whole biker gang of people doing this good deed. However, it's not to say that crowdsourcing is perfect because nothing is truly that perfect. I don't doubt that it has been used with bad intentions but all I have seen it do so far is more good than bad. I understand why companies do it; it's a quick, easy, and convenient way for them to reach out to their customers and then in turn the customers feel valued because the companies show that their opinion matters and so you get happy customers and happy companies and so everyone wins. Sure it's less personal but they get the results they want and they get them fast.

Midterm...

While it may seem as though none of these pictures could possibly have anything in common, they actually do. They all required people to focus on getting the "instagram perfect" picture in favor of enjoying the moment. For the people who posted food pictures, how much of what they ate will they remember? Will they remember how the food tasted or will they remember the possible extreme lengths they had to go through to get that perfect angle? You know, standing on a chair or other object that will give them some added height and then standing at weird and almost dangerous ways on the chair to get that perfect picture. The nature focused pictures; did the view really look that great or did the person choose to take the picture of the specific side of the landscape because it looked the best. The pictures with the person being the focus on attention; how many tries did it take for them to get the perfect picture? How long did it take for think of those motivational words. Is the picture a genuine candid or is it a posed candid? How much of their time spent in that place will they actually remember if all they were focused on was getting a picture. I understand the want to take a picture when you go someplace cool. I used to be like that; I used to be that annoying person who wanted to snapchat everything I did every time I went out somewhere (which wasn't a lot because I don't get out as much as I may say I do). Any type of motivational thing is always pictures of people, places, and food. To be honest, I am not even quite sure how half of these things supposed to motivate me. I just look at these pictures and feel envious of the cool places these people are going. I wonder if we did that same experiment as that woman did and could see how much of their surroundings these people remembered. Probably not much because they were too busy posting, looking up motivational words, and getting the right angle. After seeing all these pictures, I am still very much in favor of being in the moment and absorbing what is happening and existing around you.

To Document or Not to Document

Looking at the amount of impact that people’s photos can have on not only yourself, but others is a very interesting concept because it is not something I have really ever thought about. But after reading these two articles, the authors both brought up very good points and reminded me of my own personal experiences with instagram and looking at other people’s vacation photos.

            With relation to pictures in general, I have noticed that people are so camera focused. Whether it be a concert, their kids play, or even a dinner with friends, people love to document almost everything in their lives. Whether it be to show others what they are up to or just for their own purpose, people tend to have this compulsive need to whip out their phones anytime something exciting is happening or if their kid is doing something that they deem document worthy. While I understand the need to document things for the later purpose of having it documented, sometimes I do wish people would just be in the moment. It’s not just the compulsive need to document everything that annoys me but people’s obsession with social media. I knew someone that whenever we hung out she would be on her phone the entire time which got very annoying. We could be at dinner, watching a movie together, or just even hanging out and she would be on her phone the entire time and wouldn’t even be involved in the conversations of others around her and the fact that she thought her phone was more interesting than the people sitting in front of her was quite annoying. I try my best when I am with my friends to not be on my phone. I don’t want to be that person who is remembered as the friend who was never able to hold a conversation because she was too invested in staring at her screen. I want to create these long-lasting memories and the only way for me to do that is to not be overly invested in my phone. In relation to the compulsive documentation, too often I come across peoples overly long snapchat stories where they have decided to document the entire concert or parent who wants to film their kids entire concert. I get wanting to document these sorts of things because they are exciting but by doing so they miss out on being in the moment and just enjoying the concert and the ability to see their favorite performer live and in person or just simply enjoy seeing their kid attempt to play an instrument or sing and while they may not sound great, it is still cute to see them try. I have been to too many recitals where the entire room is nothing but phones and iPads and it just kind of ruins the beauty of the moment.

            I have no doubt that social media can alter one’s memory of an event or moment. When people take pictures of things, what it ultimately does is that it forces us to focus on one specific thing and as a result we may miss out on other things. Henkel conducted an experiment where she led a bunch of undergrad students around a museum and they looked at all sorts of cool art stuff. Some were told to take pictures while others were told to simply observe. The next day, they were told to recall what they saw, and the result of this test was that those who were told to take pictures remembered less than those who were told to observe. I think that just goes to show the importance of being in the moment because by doing so you are really able to take in the scenery and see all the small details as opposed to being photo focused and just getting your “instagram worthy” shot. That is one the reason why they don’t want us on our phones at my job, because when you are on your phone, your ability to  properly supervise the children deceases significantly and you may miss something important; whether it be a fight between campers or an injury. If you properly supervise, you can properly assess the situation and figure out how you want to handle it and if you have to rely it to a higher up, you are able to do so because you witnessed it and were able to get both sides of the story by being invested in the conversation. In the end, I do understand why people take pictures and whatnot but I also think that being in the moment and taking in your surrounding is just as important because it allows you to enjoy things more and you remember more of what happened.

https://www.citylab.com/life/2013/12/how-camera-phones-modify-our-memories/7829/