And One More Thing While We're on the Subject ..........

How many social media accounts do you have?

How many do you interact with regularly?

I'm on Facebook, dabble with Linkedin (tho I'm not sure why as my corporate days are long behind me). Tried PinInterest but lost interest, occasionally check out Twitter but can't be bothered tweeting (but never say never), I might have an account on Google + (not sure) and of course follow blogs, and write this.

As Facebook is my chosen vice, and e-v-e-r-y-o-n-e is on FB, I often LIKE pages so I can be up-to-date with what's going on, plus friends share and like all manner of pages which feed onto my page, so I get to see what their interests are, and more often than not, I also click LIKE so i can follow the pages independently.

PHEW!

You probably do the same, right?

I just looked at my profile page on FB and was shocked to see I've 323 LIKES attached to my FB profile page. When I'm done here, I'm going to go thru them all and reduce it.


My feed currently includes in the MEDIA Category:
CNN, Huffington Post, International Herald Tribune, Irish Times, The Guardian, Channel 9 (Sydney),

SPECIAL INTEREST Category:
Special Needs Parents Association Ireland (my dear friend MrsD is the Chairperson); Peter Walsh, Bam's Kitchen, Ikebana Friends, Ikebana Passion and and and and


My favourite blogs are listed to the right of here, so you can easily click on the links and see if you like them too.

Being a sticky beak, having time on my hands, and a need to assimilate into our new city quickly, all these links are very important to me. However, the quality coming out of some of them is non existent.

The interesting thing that's happened over the months is that when you follow something/someone, you feel required to have an opinion. After all, information IN results in a change, be it positive or negative, but a change none the less of what we originally thought.

We've fed our brain and our emotions 'something' and they respond.

The way to respond on social media is to comment.

WOW does that often open a mine field!

I've been abused by people I don't know and will never know; I've had total strangers agree with me; I've written stuff, then deleted it not wanting to 'get involved' I've even had one friend A FRIEND of 30 years accuse me, in an email that i was a 'bored housewife' in relation to a comment I made.

Here I am blogging, desperate for feedback from you, my lovely chatters, and while a few of you prefer to email me, and one or two do comment below, it's just nice to be able to share stuff.

Matt Walsh is a new blogger I found thru a friend on FB. He pulls no punches, and receives his fare share of comments from all types of people. Some people are down right rude - I wonder if they are that angry and rude in real life, or do they hide behind their keyboards? Don't worry, Matt definitely gives as good as he gets.

On Sunday last, Brendan O'Connor wrote it the Sunday Independent about The Week We Overdosed on Outrage. 

It got me thinking, am I suffering from this?

Does everything have to have an opinion?
Can we not read something and move on?
Does the media only focus on bad news stories deliberately?

Most of us are appalled and embarrassed with several environmental decisions the Australian Government have made in relation to dredging on the Great Barrier Reef, the annual dolphin cull by Japan has the world up in arms, the mistreatment of women the world over, millionaires going on safari in Africa and hunting animals because they can; the fallout from Fukishima the list goes on......

We read about them, we talk about them, we write about them on Social Media and subconsciously wait for the next round.

We've seen people power change things; paradigms shift; we learn from mistakes.

I've gone from hitting the LIKE button on FB a few too many times, having my home page overflow with news items I'm not really interested in (if it was in traditional newspaper form, the headline wouldn't grab me) to commenting on all sorts of things I never knew I had an opinion about to now - feeling completely overwhelmed.

The result of this apparent apoplexy is that people will stop feeling, stop caring. They will burn out, and with that, change will come slower in areas it's needed to be sped up; we'll become number to the horrid images of war, apparently a male suicide bomber isn't nearly as shocking anymore as a female one.

The madness of 24/7 media, and the (sad) drop in journalist integrity and professionalism is at the heart of our combined exhaustion. There's no point looking at things thru rose coloured glasses, but there is so many incredibly magnificent, creative, clever, funny, thoughtful, resourceful, entrepreneurial, caring, intelligent people doing amazing things why aren't these reported with the same gusto?

People power is vitally important as we know from history it can change things.

We mustn't stop commenting and having opinions, but what must stop is the rudeness.

And I must reduce the number of feeds I get on my FB page, along with the need to add One More Thing While We're On the Subject.

With friendship
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