Unsocial Networker

One thing our instructor for Job Orientation warned us repeatedly was to be careful about what we post on our social media pages. Prospective (and current) employers do check these things, and may decide you're not such a good fit if they find *ahem* unseemly materials being posted. I have an excellent defense against that: I don't have social media accounts!

(Although, admittedly, that just sets me up for an entire other set of problems. It probably looks like I'm trying to hide something. I'm not, it's just that, for the most part, I don't see the point of social media. I am not a social person by nature, and I don't feel any particular need to broadcast my every thought and action, every minute of every day.)

And then there's the matter of the websites themselves. They all offer little appeal to me, for one reason or another:

Myspace is almost defunct, even more so after losing ten years worth of material users posted.

Facebook has overly-complicated security settings that are so labyrinthine in nature that they may have been inspired by the works of Franz Kafka. Security settings that are hard to understand and likely to leave you vulnerable? Little wonder millions of accounts have been hacked. And even if you're safe from outside threats, you're aren't necessarily safe from inside threats. Turns out Facebook was actively selling off the personal information of its users.

The majority of what is posted on Twitter is vapid and uninteresting; people just post whatever random thoughts occur to them, shout it out online, without any real planning. Not to mention it's basically the perfect playground for argumentative idiots and abusive psychos to harass other people.

Friendster IS defunct.

While I don't have any particular enmity for Tumblr, the times I have been on the site, it just seemed disorganized to me. Everything is just there, out in the open; good luck finding a particular item!

Pinterest means nothing to me, as I have no craft projects that I'm working on.

Instagram is a site for posting pictures, which is fine, except for the fact that I don't take that many pictures! I'm not taking pictures constantly, I'm not traveling to exotic locales, I'm not dining on sumptuous meals. I have very little to offer in the way of images.

I've never seen the point of Snapchat - why go to the trouble of uploading a picture if it's just going to be deleted in less than a minute?