Brave New World... and a Fascinating One Too

So yesterday was my first birthday after joining Facebook. I've lost track of how many birthday wishes I received online... from relatives I haven't seen in twenty years to colleagues I only barely know. And it felt good. I was smiling all day. Which got me to thinking about this "social media" world and relationships and vulnerability and stuff like that.

I've also started studying social media from a professional standpoint to help nonprofits connect with their people. A key to getting along in this quirky little world seems to be to give, give, give and trust that others will respond in kind. We give links to our favorite funny videos, we share our outrage over political bungling, we applaud each other constantly, we share our triumphs and also our struggles.

I struggle over the struggle-sharing. How much is too much? When do we cross the line from sharing to whining? And, just how vulnerable do I really want to be? It's one thing to share my self-doubts or hurts with my close friends, quite another to put them out there for consumption by people with whom I have not had enough real-world interaction to know whether I can trust them with my pain. Often, as I type I'm thinking "will this come back to bite me later?"

I have one comfort, and offer it to those who share my reluctance to open up in public writings. I tend to be a "real" person - or so I have been told. Sometimes I'm too direct, and it can make others uncomfortable. I'm learning how to moderate that.... But so long as I am not showing one face to my friends and quite another to my professional contacts and still another to my family... well, then, I guess I won't have to face that imagined future episode where the Integrity Police shine a spotlight in my face while yelling "wait, on Facebook two years ago you said something quite different - you hypocrite!"

But maybe I am most afraid to be vulnerable in front of ME. Maybe I don't trust myself to be uniformly real, genuine, sincere. Maybe my insatiable inner critic still has more power over me than I'd like to admit. Maybe it isn't others that I'm most worried about. Hmmm. Does that make me a hypocrite after all?