I am not that great at social media, personally or professionally.  I have this blog.  I have a personal FB account.  I have a couple other blogs that I neglect to such an extreme that they should just be shut down.  I have a LinkedIn account for my real name that I never update.

That’s it.

Twitter scares me because I think I’d start using it and never do any work ever again.

And I’m anti-social even on social media.  I bookmark blogs, but never follow them.  I’ll happily write a blog post about someone else’s blog post but the number of times I’ve actually posted on someone else’s blog is probably less than ten and I think always on well-established blogs I’ve followed long enough to believe I can trust the blogger not to edit or manipulate my words.

I think at this point I’ve unfriended more people on FB than I have friends on there.  And I have my privacy settings and name on there set in such a way that you can’t actually find me unless you’ve already found me.

Why?  I don’t know.  I think in another life I must have been some version of a paranoid psychotic.  I don’t know if I mentioned it on here before, but one of my jobs gave you all these psychology tests.  One was Meyers-Briggs, which I have mentioned on here.  Another was how susceptible you are to influence.

Me?  I was so unsusceptible to influence that it was almost a negative number.  Whatever made me score that is the same thing that keeps me from diving into online social interaction.  At some basic level, I don’t trust it.

Every time someone FB shares one of those “If you really care about X will you post this on your page for an hour.  I know most people won’t (because they’re cruel, heartless, horrible people who don’t care), but I will, will you?” I immediately have a gut reaction that someone is playing on my emotions to manipulate me.  I don’t know what they get out of it, I just know someone made me feel crappy so I’d do what they want and I don’t like that so I don’t do it.

Anyway.  I’m rambling.  Blame it on Chuck Wendig.  I started this post to share his post:

The Social Media Rules That Govern My Slapdash Online Existence

It was nice to see someone else who admits to readily unfriending people on FB.

I agree with much of what he says in the post, so definitely worth a read.  And always entertaining as only he can be…