YOUNGBLOOD
Social butterfly
“You have xxx friends in your social network.”
These days, the number in this statement is (potentially) as important as your credit card limit, your account balance, or your official designation. In a day and age when “virtual” friends are as important as the “live” ones you have coffee with once a week, creating the appropriate online persona and cultivating a fruitful online social network become imperative. Gone are the days when colleagues and clients have no clue about our lives outside work and about how we spend our weekends. These days, everyone knows what everyone else does, eats, wears, loves and hates.
This often puts me in interesting predicaments: My online buddies sometimes know more about my everyday life than my best friends (my “soul sisters,” who unfortunately have yet to be bitten by the social networking bug). My beloved -- the subject of most of my rosy ramblings -- meets acquaintances who are “fans” of my blog and who know details of our love life. Long-lost friends and high school classmates have become close connections not because of our after-work conversations but because of the virtual hugs, drinks, fortune cookies and notes we exchange online.
The upside is that, as a writer, I am given more avenues for creative expression and experimentation. I manage my numerous blogs as if they were magazines, with specific themes and formats. One is on the sweet details of life and romance. Another is about a girl’s exploration and journey toward authenticity. Still another is about “soul work” and about the tools that help us gain a deeper understanding of our inner selves. I have an online portfolio of published pieces. And yet another is a “best of” blog. Whatever doesn’t get published on paper gets posted online; it’s perfect for the work that I do and the kind of readership I want to develop.
But this does have its downside. Just as in real relationships, these social networks take time and effort to cultivate. If you’re serious about your online connections, you tend to spend more time in front of the PC doing “busywork” than you should. Instead of having coffee with friends or spending quality time with loved ones, you are kept busy “poking” someone on Facebook, posting photos and videos on Multiply or MySpace, or answering late-night surveys on Friendster. While it can be helpful if done moderately, it can be distracting (especially if your partner or the people closest to you are uninitiated).
Online social networking also comes with its own (self-imposed) restrictions. As a writer who makes a living on the thoughts and observations that make it to the printed page, I have no choice but to treat my online networks as an extension of my professional contacts. I have to be careful about everything I post on Multiply, Blogger, Facebook, Friendster, or i.ph, and I can’t (fortunately or unfortunately) blog about anything that will put my artistic or professional integrity in question. No griping about this or that client, no spilling the beans about a subject before the article comes out in print, no pre-empting any special events or launches that have yet to be announced, no ranting that will make me seem like a mess, and definitely no grammatically incorrect posts! The friends who make up my social networks are potential readers and clients; therefore, everything that I put out there has to be consistent with who I am and what my work stands for.
The online revolution has done much for the World, and online social networking has likewise helped to boost my career. In the past few years that I have been a member of online networking sites, I have reconnected with many classmates and long-lost friends, tapped many prospective clients, developed a following for my kind of writing and honed my craft in a way that I wasn’t able to do in the years before blogging. I have become more confident and more aware of my strengths, and I also have become more conscious of my social responsibility as a writer. Apparently, people find time to read what I write, so I had better make my posts worth reading!
In spite of all this, I feel that there’s a crucial element that I’m missing out on sometimes: personal, face-to-face conversations. I often find myself in front of the computer for far too long stretches that my social life suffers. Sure, my online contacts know what I’m going through and what I’m thinking, but my partner is wondering why my moods swing the way they do sometimes. (“It’s in my blog,” I tell him.) I take it for granted that not everyone is online, and that personal relationships are (still) far more valuable than online ones.
So even if I enjoy being an online “social butterfly,” don’t be surprised when there isn’t too much activity on my blogs. On those days, I am probably sipping a nice, warm cup of tea, enjoying great conversation with a good friend, in a place where hugs and drinks can be exchanged in person.
Niña Terol, 27, is a writer, editor, communications consultant, lifestyle reporter, and arts and culture enthusiast.
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