Social Media – Communicating more or less?

As a webmaster, hoping to get traffic to my site, I followed the Social Media craze, signed up for MySpace, then Facebook, and Twitter and Pinterest, Google+, and who only knows what else I have signed up for.

Now that I have plastered myself all over the internet I have regrets. If I were to do it all over again I would join Facebook under a different name, a nickname, and I would have avoided all the others.

So much for hindsight. Part of the reason for my blog is to pull myself together and not feel like I have scattered bits and pieces all around the internet. If I am going to be out there then I would like to have a little more control over it. Simple.

Some things I have signed up for I JUST DON’T GET. Like Twitter. Never will understand the purpose or usefulness of it. Someday I hope someone can explain it to me.

And Pinterest. What is the purpose?

Seems to me that communication between people has been reduced to contact through the internet. Gobs and gobs of superficial contact.

Talk about profiling. Geez. I was on Google+ the other day (still trying to figure that one out. Seems like every time I visit the page it has changed and I have to learn again how to use it) and while on the Google+ page a message popped up about a friend of an acquaintance had done something or other. ??????

I feel very uncomfortable about how our communication is being tracked, sorted, analyzed, grouped and connected which is then manipulated by large corporations. I can think of a 100 different ways this information could be abused.

I am thinking about taking up the art of letter writing as a way to stay in touch. While the very act of sending something through the mail will be tracked, as far as I know the content will not be.