Sheep

I feel dated when I think of how the interwebs used to be and the social networking sites of the old days.  When AOL first came around everyone started to jump onboard that ship and keep their phone lines tied up that no phone calls could come into the house.  There was even the trick to block incoming calls to keep from being disconnected.  For those who didn't know that code it was easy for someone who knew you were online to disconnect you by calling your house phone.  There were even those who shared accounts and when one person was online the other couldn't, this was the category I fell in.  

I never had my own account and mooched off of friends.  Jumping around from friend to friend trying to find one that used it the least.  It was a gateway to the internet, you needed to be connected somehow and AOL was the way to go to get to the other websites of the world.  It was even great for chatting with friends, and of course meeting new people with the overly used age/sex/loc introduction.

There might be a few that I miss along the way as I wasn't that adepth with the social networking site culture and tried to avoid it as much as possible.  

The next memory I have was xanga, the blogging site where you could have friends.  I think I joined this but signed up and left it at that.  Although I remember seeing friends putting their entire life stories on their blogs, the best being when there was relationship problems and the breakups went on blast for the world to see.  

Moving on from that came the other blogging sites like blogger, wordpress and whatever others you can think of.  But the networking was still there as you can browse strangers blogs and your friends.

The wonderful world of Friendster came and touched our lives by finding out who are friends were!  But that went overboard when people started to friend us who weren't even our friends but simply friends of friends.  We were able to see who we were connected to and how that network started and ended.  We were also able to see who's been looking at our profiles ... cue in the stalkers.  

Myspace came like the plaque and had everyone join.  I refused for so long to join it with the argument that it was just a huge meat market for people to find people to hook up with and a place to cheat online.  I was right for the most part but then I joined.  The reason I joined was a good one too, it was to see my friends' pictures.  In other words to stalk them and see what they have been up to.  The layouts and themes started where people changed their pages to try to be original and be set apart from everyone else, some became way to much.  Myspace was a good place to get exposure though once they started the music part of it.  Upcoming musicians made a name for themselves and were able to get themselves out to the public.  Especially to the younger age groups who were online 24/7.

During those days I remember trying to join Facebook but it was limited to those who had email accounts from their respective schools, so I wasn't able to jump on that ... yet.  

Ahhh the day finally came when they opened Facebook up to the public and I created an account, reluctantly.  I wasn't going to be the person to update my status or comment, I wasn't planning to be a participating member of the community.  All I wanted to do was find my friends, people I actually knew and look at their pictures, again stalker status.  

That's how it all started, but when friends start to tell you about their day and what is on their mind or what they are planning to do or doing, you can't help but start to see what they are up to.  So it goes from looking at the pictures to finding out what they are doing.  I've had people who got into fights because they couldn't go out for one reason or another, but their status and pictures tell a different story.  Many fights came from this and I'm sure it's still going on today.  Even seeing pictures of your gf/bf with other people in compromising situations have caused fights.  

I stayed away from commenting, from updating my status for so long.  It would only be once in a while that I would check the site and see if anything interesting was going on, after all I hated these social networking sites.  They weren't for me, I was old school and if you wanted to get to me, find me on AIM.  I didn't feel the need to update my status [even on AIM], or message people.  

But as with most things, and with most people, I became one of the sheep.  The sheep following the herd and where I started to comment on people's status' and pictures.  Where I started to update mine, but keeping it limited to not tmi.  I see where people put way too much information out there on their pages and I didn't want to be that way, and I'm glad I'm still not.  There are limits for me when it comes to updating things, and posting status', pictures and even here in this blog.  So many thoughts come to mind, but I have to restrict it because I don't want the interwebs to have every single piece of information on me.  Afterall, I need to keep some things to myself.

It's true that it can effect your job or potential job with what you have out there on the net, especially the social networking sites.  Everytime there was a new employee, my coworkers and I would try to find them on Myspace or Facebook.  We'd usually find them and see their info, see what they did on the weekends, after work hours and what they were into.  

Here I am, updating my status, picture commenting, updating my profile pics, commenting on others' status messages.  I already knew I was falling into what everone else and their mama's (and dads) were doing.  But I had to somehow keep away from falling into deep, I even stayed away from Twitter thinking that I would put meaningless updates about my life ... or maybe again tmi about my life.  So I find myself installing the Facebook app on my Blackberry today ... not a good sign.  I need to do as the words on the back of the ambulance and fire trucks say ... stay back 200 feet.  

I don't want to be this close to the action and have it handy all the time.  There are other things to do in life besides checking up on other people to see what they are up to and how they are doing, there's more to just updating my status to tell the world that I want to have tea.  All the information is out there on everyone and me being the way I am have to find a way to keep me contained somehow.  Now I try to find a way to be that sheep that strays from the rest and not just follow blindly.  

Good luck to me ... I might be too far in to get out!

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