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<div id="pastingspan1"><span style="">I fondly remember when social media was just becoming a thing when I was in grad school. I was an early adopter of Friendster and MySpace. I loved changing my sparkly background and song that played on my MySpace page. I loved indiscriminately changing my Top 8, scanning photos (with a SCANNER) to post on my page and writing nonsense posts on my friends&#8217; profiles. </span></div><div id="pastingspan1"><span style=""><br /></span></div><div id="pastingspan1"><span style="">Then came Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Snapchat (which I still haven&#8217;t quite figured out) and probably dozens of other social media sites that I haven&#8217;t even heard of yet. </span></div><div id="pastingspan1"><span style=""><br /></span></div><div id="pastingspan1"><span style="">Over the years, I went from dedicated Facebooker, with multiple posts per day (including albums of photos documenting just about every single thing I did each day), to a once-a-week poster. Why? </span></div><div id="pastingspan1"><span style=""><br /></span></div><div id="pastingspan1"><span style="">Well, part of the answer is that I&#8217;ve grown up and no longer feel like I need to broadcast my every move to 1,000 people who I know in varying degrees ranging from &#8220;husband&#8221; to &#8220;person I literally met once, couldn&#8217;t pick out of a lineup and unfollowed years ago.&#8221; </span></div><div id="pastingspan1"><span style=""><br /></span></div><div id="pastingspan1"><span style="">I suppose I&#8217;ve shied away from Facebook in general because of the content that surfaces each day. If it isn&#8217;t someone ignorantly arguing with a stranger that has an opposing viewpoint, it&#8217;s someone posting a link to a GoFundMe campaign or a video of a neglected animal in need of adoption or surgery that its owner can&#8217;t afford. </span></div><div id="pastingspan1"><span style=""><br /></span></div><div id="pastingspan1"><span style="">To be clear, I don&#8217;t have any issue with people having an opposing viewpoint to my own. The problem for me, particularly in the last six months, has been people&#8217;s disrespectful, baseless arguments that they push on other people &#8211; often times strangers. To support their claims, people use links to articles on click-bait websites with domain names like xyzinternet.com and call it facts. To me, it seems like a huge waste of time to try to change someone&#8217;s beliefs &#8211; and if you&#8217;re going to try, why does it have to get so ugly so quickly? </span></div><div id="pastingspan1"><span style=""><br /></span></div><div id="pastingspan1"><span style="">And at my age, and at this point in my life, I have a hard time being bombarded by ignorance and, honestly, by sad things, whether it&#8217;s an injured dog or breaking news of yet another Chicago murder. I don&#8217;t want to avoid the news, but I also don&#8217;t want to be immersed in heavy, serious topics every time I want a five-minute break to see what my friends are up to.</span></div><div id="pastingspan1"><span style=""><br /></span></div><div id="pastingspan1"><span style="">What happened to the bumper sticker app? Or innocent fun, like poking? Until I figure this out, I guess I&#8217;ll just stick to posting pictures of my healthy, happy, cute dog.</span></div>

1851 Franchise

From Myspace Top 8s to strangers arguing via Facebook comments, the nature of social media has changed.

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