Myspace came on the scene when I was an awkward teenager. I know this makes me sound like a brat, but when I was a teenager I spent my free time with friends who were in their twenties. In some ways that helped me grow up fast, but in other ways I had no idea how to deal with age appropriate topics.
This made me the weird girl in my small high school of about 200 students. It wasn’t like I was sitting in the back of the classroom eating my hair, I got along with lots of different people. But I was a social wanderer. Despite being able to talk to anyone about things that we found interesting, I couldn’t really connect.
Myspace merged my life outside of school with the people I had trouble connecting with at school. Without having to treat social life like an investigation, people had easy ways to connect with each other by sharing their personality online.
These were great benefits, but they came at a cost. For a while technology became very alluring. I don’t know if this is what you experienced when everyone around you got on social media, but there was a time period when social media became such a time suck that people were virtually interacting with each other instead of physically hanging out.
Myspace is obviously irrelevant. But I also think Facebook has become inessential to me too. I am interested in speaking to people directly and no longer see the need for getting social media involved. Now I sound like an addict, but there’s been a release with a natural transition away from social media. I’ve experienced the trend of social media integrating our physical activities with Location Based Software (LBS).