There are certain things you should know about people. There are other things you should not know about people.
I care if you have a good or bad day. I don’t care, however, when you shower or how often you use the bathroom. Yet that is what a lot of people like to post online.
Social media is exploding right now. Not growing, exploding. Growing would indicate that it is gradually increasing at some normal reasonable rate. It is not. In a very short time, everyone has been infected with a need for socializing over media like some sort of global pandemic. First college students then high schoolers, parents, aunts, uncles, grandparents and now everyone else.
This wouldn’t be so bad if people used some restraint in what they shared. Unfortunately, too many people like to overshare. Oversharing is when you share an inappropriate amount of information about yourself online. Thanks to social media, the Internet is quite literally a stalker’s paradise.
On a random side note, I find it funny that social media imitates real life; the people talking the most usually have the least to say.
With location-based technologies and social technologies advancing so rapidly, it was inevitable that the two would cross paths. Now, you can geo-tag (attach your GPS coordinates) your social media posts on many popular sites.
This was cool because it told your friends exactly where you were. What most people didn’t bother to realize is that it also told everyone else where you are.
A website called Please Rob Me was created to poke fun at people while giving them an important lesson in online safety. They took all tweets by people where they talked about leaving home, checking in at in airport, getting to a hotel or anything else that indicated they weren’t home. Knowing those people weren’t home, they put their user information up on their homepage saying “I’m not home. Please rob me.”
The lesson is that it’s important to think about what you share online. You can want to be a part of the world’s online conversation, but don’t be too cavalier about how you do it.
