{"id":40711,"date":"2015-07-11T17:16:06","date_gmt":"2015-07-11T21:16:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/totfc.net\/?p=40711"},"modified":"2020-07-16T17:16:16","modified_gmt":"2020-07-16T21:16:16","slug":"social-media-discretion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/?p=40711","title":{"rendered":"Social media discretion"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/p>\n

I\u2019m by nature a pretty cynical person.\u00a0 Yeah, I know that that\u2019s not necessarily the greatest personality trait to admit to, but it\u2019s kind of true.\u00a0 Thoughts go through my mind all the time whenever I see certain things, and it\u2019s often times a mental scale being weighed on whether or not I should say them, or express them on social media.\u00a0 I thought about it today, and if I had to place a number on the thoughts that I\u00a0don\u2019t<\/em>\u00a0say, I\u2019d would probably venture something like 85-90% of thoughts that might come off as cynically skeptical do not make it through the pipes and out of my mouth or typed by my fingers.<\/span><\/p>\n

As a sample, here\u2019s a thought I had that I\u2019ll share on my brog because only six people read it, but wouldn\u2019t share on social media, because that would paint me publicly as a curmudgeon:<\/span><\/p>\n

Nobody who\u2019s already been to a prior Comic Con actually envies those who are going for the present one.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

<\/p>\n

This is something I thought about in response to the number of people I see on Facebook who are boasting about their travels to beautiful San Diego for this year\u2019s Comic Con, or proclaiming their envy, wishes or desires to also be attending.<\/span><\/p>\n

Naturally, I use an umbrella pronoun like \u201cnobody,\u201d when I really am referring to solely myself, and assuming that there are plenty of like-minded people who have also been to a Comic Con in the past, and feel similarly.\u00a0 But the thing is that I don\u2019t envy anyone who\u2019s going for the first time; sure, I hope that they have a great time, meet a lot of people, pick up a lot of swag, dine at many of the great eateries in San Diego, but not for one second do I envy anyone who has to stand in numerous lines of literal thousands, be shoulder-to-shoulder with 175,000 other people, crammed into hotels, hallways, sidewalks and restaurants for four days.<\/span><\/p>\n

Hypocritically, I was so excited about Comic Con two years ago, that I made a litany of passive-aggressive humble boasts about how I was getting to go to San Diego, how much I loved Richard Walker\u2019s, and so forth.\u00a0 I wonder if there were people who had been to prior Comic Cons that thought similarly to how I feel now, about how much of a schmuck I\u2019d feel like when I\u2019m standing in line for what\u2019s advertised as \u201cComic Con Exclusives\u201d that will ultimately be on the shelves of Hot Topic by October?<\/span><\/p>\n

Comic Con was cool and something I\u2019m glad I experienced, but it\u2019s not something that I really feel like I\u2019d be missing if I never went again.<\/span><\/p>\n

But anyway, that\u2019s an example of a cynical thought that goes through my head from time to time, but I would typically not share over social media.\u00a0 Perhaps a longer time ago, I might\u2019ve, but then I probably would\u2019ve grown sad when I realized that people would glaze over the things I had to say, because I would be one, posting too fucking often, and two, everything would sound really cynical and I\u2019d most certainly be painted as a curmudgeon, contrarian asshole.<\/span><\/p>\n

I thought about it, and I guess the phrase that formulated in my head is that I\u2019ve (thankfully) developed something of a social media discretion towards what I post on social media.<\/span><\/p>\n

Sure, I think a lot of things that would sound pretty droll and cynical, but frankly, I think a lot of people all over the world, with less social media discretion than I do, already fill up the internet with all sorts of droll and cynical, without me.\u00a0 So, often times, very many often times, I simply choose to not verbalize my cynical thoughts, especially in written online text, where once it\u2019s on the internet, it\u2019s on the internet forever, in some capacity.<\/span><\/p>\n

It\u2019s like, I think about the earliest stages of the internet, through like Prodigy, CompuServe, and America Online, and how the internet was touted as this great learning resource that was going to revolutionize the world.\u00a0 Sure, the internet has made tremendous strides, but aside from all the obvious jokes, it\u2019s become where we get pretty much all of our news now.\u00a0 And it took very little time at all for the internet to adopt all the same strategies and adages learned from the printed news disciplines:<\/span><\/p>\n