I’m vaguely living a lie. I try to put forth the image that I only peripherally participate in social media, am slow to catch on to trends, and mostly, kind of hate it. Two truths and a lie here, because while the latter (I kind of hate it) may be a fact, I participate more than peripherally, and am hardly slow to catch on to trends. As mentioned in a previous post, I had an internet journal in high school, more than ten years ago, WAY before the advent of Web 2.0. I subsequently had a friendster account, a myspace account, and- although I deleted it- had a facebook account during its first wave for college students only.
Now, this is not to say I didn’t experience mild to moderate anxiety every time one of these social media went obsolete. I deal poorly with change. I resisted switching from friendster to myspace when all of my friends did, put forth similar resistance when they all moved from myspace to facebook and, though facebook seems far from the precipice of being replaced, the presence of twitter gives me similar anxiety.
I’ve recently been coerced into opening a twitter account for Public History Media class. Though I’ve yet to tweet yet, our assignment was to “lurk” around twitter, which I have done plenty of myself already. I’ve looked quite frequently at the pages of friends and of institutions I am interested in, but for some reason, never felt compelled to join twitter and frankly, am a little terrified of it. As I did a little more lurking, I tried to figure out why. It is more than just vague anxiety that twitter will render all other social media obsolete and I’ll be forced- yet again- into a social media upheaval. What is it about twitter that is so intimidating?