{"id":688,"date":"2010-08-26T15:15:00","date_gmt":"2010-08-26T15:15:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bestfantasynovel.com\/2010\/08\/26\/social-media-the-cult-of-you\/"},"modified":"2010-08-26T15:15:00","modified_gmt":"2010-08-26T15:15:00","slug":"social-media-the-cult-of-you","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/taramayastales.com\/bestfantasynovel\/2010\/08\/26\/social-media-the-cult-of-you\/","title":{"rendered":"Social Media &#8211; The Cult of You"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Social media has been called &#8220;the cult of me.&#8221; It encourages each of us to cultivate our own little cult, to gather around us a circle of &#8220;Friends&#8221; and &#8220;Followers&#8221;, sometimes even &#8220;Minions.&#8221; Seems like the ultimate in self-indulgence, doesn&#8217;t it? <\/p>\n<p>But does social media really encourage selfishness? Is worrying about what other people think of you is a form of selfishness, or is it a matter of not giving enough consideration to your own self-integrity, obsessing instead over pleasing others?<\/p>\n<p>Jane Steen warned in her blog post on <a href=\"http:\/\/keepgoingyoufool.blogspot.com\/2010\/08\/5-ways-to-make-your-twitter-time-more.html\">5 ways to make your twitter time more productive<\/a> that the surefire way to make your twitter (or facebook) posts deadly dull is to tweet all about yourself (and your kids, pets, wordcount). Actually, I think posts about oneself, even about one&#8217;s cat, <i>can<\/i> be interesting &#8212; there are more pictures of cats on the internet than porn! &#8212; as long as the poster keeps one motto in mind:<\/p>\n<p><b>It&#8217;s not about you.<\/b><\/p>\n<p>This is the irony of social networks. You write about yourself, you post about yourself, you promote yourself, but it is not about you &#8212; it&#8217;s about what you can do for other people. Are you tweeting\/posting something that will make someone smile or snort or sigh? When you read other peoples&#8217; tweets and posts, are you thinking, not, how does this help me, but, how can I help them?<\/p>\n<p>And sometimes the best way to help someone else is to let them know that they <i>have<\/i> helped you. Because the good people on the web, not the trolls, are on the web asking themselves the same question, how can I help the people around me? How can I add value?<\/p>\n<p>A lot of people do succeed in adding value, from a post that makes one think about a problem in a new way, to a comment that makes one smile, to even bigger things. I was terribly nervous about going on Facebook and Twitter because of the Timesuck Issue, and indeed, it&#8217;s worse than I thought (and yet so much better) because I&#8217;ve also found out about wonderful books to read, events I want to attend, and people I want to get to know better. And chances are I won&#8217;t have as much time to do those things as I&#8217;d like. But the problem is one of TMGS &#8212; Too Much Good Sh&#8230; er, Stuff.<\/p>\n<p>And of all the  problems to have TMGS is pretty much the best of the lot. <\/p>\n<p>Oh, and by all means, if I&#8217;m not following you on Twitter or Facebook, drop me a note and I&#8217;ll remedy that.  \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Social media has been called &#8220;the cult of me.&#8221; It encourages each of us to cultivate our own little cult, to gather around us a circle of &#8220;Friends&#8221; and &#8220;Followers&#8221;, sometimes even &#8220;Minions.&#8221; Seems like the ultimate in self-indulgence, doesn&#8217;t it? But does social media really encourage selfishness? Is worrying about what other people think [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-688","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/taramayastales.com\/bestfantasynovel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/688","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/taramayastales.com\/bestfantasynovel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/taramayastales.com\/bestfantasynovel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/taramayastales.com\/bestfantasynovel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/taramayastales.com\/bestfantasynovel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=688"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/taramayastales.com\/bestfantasynovel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/688\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/taramayastales.com\/bestfantasynovel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=688"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/taramayastales.com\/bestfantasynovel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=688"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/taramayastales.com\/bestfantasynovel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=688"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}