privacy

The social media world — how do you handle it?

When I was a youngster, social media wasn’t even thought about.

During the day, you’d go outside and play. You’d run around, breathe in the fresh air and be carefree. If it wasn’t a school night, the basic premise used to be that you headed home when the street lights came on.

Fellow parents knew where the group of kids were. They’d peek and watch out, but wouldn’t helicopter.

We could scrape knees (ouch!) and get dirty without having to report everything to parents. It could also be done without people threatening to sue somebody else.

But we live in a new age.

All the bad things we see out there in the media happened way back when. It’s a sad state, for sure. But they happened. Kids were kidnapped, there were people killing others and violence.

The big difference was the reporting of it.

If, for example, something happened in Oregon, we didn’t always hear about it in New York.

Now there’s the Internet, of course, and with that comes social media.

Ignore everything I said above. This isn’t about society, per say, with social media. This is more on a smaller scale. This is about you or me or people we know.

And I’m curious — how free are you with your social media?

The other night, after attending an event, I posted, on Facebook, a photo I took of a friend. I tagged him in it and that was it.

The next day, I had two friend requests from people I had never met and, as far as I know, never spoke with them.

And it was connected to said photo.

I didn’t accept and left it at that. But it got me thinking … how free are you with things like this?

I’m very protective of my private life. Though my job doesn’t put me in the “public eye” per say, I have a public job … so it’s pretty open. My private life is just that — my private life and I like to keep it that way.

I have a few rules, when it comes to my personal Facebook account:

• I have to know you (and usually in real life — it’s rare for me to friend somebody I only know through the online world, but there are exceptions);
• I can’t work with you (again, a few exceptions to the rule have and will happen);
• Don’t post about things like politics and religion, and stay away from posts that do (and the same goes for my blog).

It’s that simple.

I also like to keep my list to fewer than 250 people … and even that is way too many in my eyes. But I’ve connected with family and older friends, so I figure it’s all good in the end.

Every 6-8 months, I’ll go through the list and weed some out. Mostly it’s people I haven’t kept in contact with and such. It’s just part of life.

But I’m not free with the Facebook world, that’s for sure. My settings are private etc. as I want to keep it that way.

I’m a little more open and free with things like Twitter and Instagram, but I don’t look at that as I do the ‘Book. Instagram is more of a photo documentary of things that I see. And Twitter … I don’t use it as much as I used to, but have been trying to do a little more with it. Though I keep those pretty open, I still try and make sure there’s nothing too crazy on them. Though I dabble in other social media, there would be the big three.

So how about all of you?

How do you deal with social media and how much do you let others into it? Discuss below as I’d love to see what you all think!

Feel free to leave a comment, or e-mail P.J. at hoohaablog [at] gmail.com. Also, please “Like” HooHaa Blog on Facebook!