Okay, so without completely giving away my age, not that it matters, because I will tell you if you ask, after I make you stand on your head while balancing a fish bowl full of live goldfish and reciting the fourth paragraph of the Canadian Constitution, I have come to realise that I am thankful I was young and stupid in an age when social media did not exist.  No really.

Back in the day computer class was more about writing code than it was about learning how to operate the programs that are now part of the whole operating a computer experience.  We used black and green screens and I’m not talking about the colour of the monitor.  There was no mouse, we used what are now known as hot keys.  I still use them more often than using a mouse.  So what ARE children learning in computer class at school … not to write code that is for sure! My own daughters are learning how to safely surf the internet and how to use programmes such as Word Perfect and PowerPoint.  While this is all well and dandy, what if their computer goes to the black screen of death?  Are they taught what to do then?  I’m sure that they could always call their Uncle, but between calls from other family members needing help with their machines, I’m sure his real job would much rather he pay attention to what they pay him for!

But I’m digressing.  Using social media has become a verb not a noun as it once was.  Even in common place conversations with people we know well and not so well we use these terms.  We no longer say, “I looked up something on Google.com” it is now, “I Googled it”.  And with this digital age, comes fancy new toys that we all love to have and some make better use of than others.  Digital cameras, camera phones, digital video recorders, laptop computers, net books, almost all of which can upload to the internet in minutes if not seconds.  All these items contribute to some, sometimes entertaining pictures and videos.  They also contribute to the horror that is social media.  You cannot deny that at some point you have made an ass of yourself and most likely some level of alcohol was involved.  Okay, I’ll admit it.  In my early 20′s I regularly made a complete idiot of myself, sometimes in public and most definitely alcohol was involved.  Sometimes it wasn’t, but mostly it was.  Thankfully!  THANKFULLY!!  Any pictures that were taken were taken on good old fashioned 35mm that had to be developed and mostly there were not many camera carrying people about so I can only cringe at old memories.  THANK THE HOLY LORD IN HEAVEN FOR THAT!  Even one of my best friends admits to flashing “the girls” to whomever wanted a gander in heavily intoxicated states back in the day and today, while thankful she did so when her body was worthy of showing off, she too is thankful that there were no such things as social media sights like there is now.

I can honestly say I have seen how it can ruin people’s reputation and when you are a young man or woman that follows you … EVERYWHERE!  Young impressionable women, wanting nothing more than to please their boyfriends are not just “flashing the girls” for a fella to see they are taking pictures and sending them via text messages and/or emails.  So what happens when they break up on a not so congenial level?  What happens when those pictures show up on a background check done for the job they have studied so hard to get and now are not able to get the job because of some simple, idiotic, misguided mistake.  I know I have had some pretty nasty blow outs with boyfriends and both sides of the relationship did the whole smear campaign, but then there were no pictures to be posted on the internet FOR THE ENTIRE WORLD TO SEE!  This follows you and too often people don’t think about what the road down the line is gonna look like. 

With the way that social media is progressing, it is no doubt that in the not so distant future we will be able to sit and have coffee with a hologram of our friends who are on the other side of the world.  If you’ve got the savvy, you could do that now after creating an avatar and joining a 2d alter universe.  Hard drives are not that hard to crack and just because you have deleted something does not mean it is gone forever.  The only way to make sure that you are never in that situation is to not put yourself there to begin with.  But when you’re young and out to have a bit of fun, how do you prevent that?  No doubt someone in the crowd is going to be toting a tiny camera with a 5 mega pixel lens and I don’t know the last time I did not see a phone without a camera that was capable of sending the pictures taken with it.

How do you warn the coming generations?  Too many of the television and radio talk shows are filled with remorseful teens and young adults that have had their lives ruined at such tender early ages because of not only these devices, but also because of social media websites where the pictures and videos have been posted for the world to see.  And you know we see it everyday and most often we either don’t recognize it for what it is, or we don’t stop the train wreck we see happening in front of us.  Sometimes its stoppable and other times it isn’t.

Social networking … how sociable is it really?