There’s a massive array of social media tools and networks out there and it seems to me that there’s also a perceived pressure among digital natives to be actively involved in all of them.

But perhaps we are starting to enter an age of more Discerning Social Networking.  Which means not only sharing our lives and interacting only with the groups we really care about, but using and integrating only the social networking tools that really work for us.

For example, I tried out Twitter 18 months ago but at the time it didn’t really do much for me.  So although I still keep my eye on a few Twitterers via RSS feeds, I’ve deleted my account.  I have profiles on facebook and LinkedIn with links to my personal blog, but I’m not on myspace or bebo.  I use flickr, but mostly via a feed into my blog’s sidebar as well as using RSS to view my friend’s latest pics. 

In short, I’m choosing to use the tools that work for me and interacting with them in whichever way suits my needs best.  Maybe the ways in which we chose to interact with social networking sites will become as important as the actual social interactions which happen via them? 

posted by gemmaT

I’ve been wading through lots of Social Media Predictions for 2009 (including Peter Kim’s excellent piece) and one of the trends that kept cropping up was Cleansing.

It seems that 2009 is going to be about streamlining, sanitising and decluttering our online lives, ‘defriending’ people on facebook you haven’t actually seen since your schooldays and hacking away at your RRS feed until its short enough that you actually have time to read the posts it turns up.

The New Year always brings resolutions to simplify our lives and it looks like 2009 might be the turning point when this kicks in online.  If nothing else, we need to future-proof our digital footprint. 

The politicians of 2030 are currently at university, happily posting drunken pictures of themselves on facebook.  The tabloid press of the future is going to have a field day dredging up digital evidence of the past misdemeanors of figures in the public eye, with facebook, flickr, myspace and twitter being mercilessly scoured for any hint of scandal.  I don’t think the message has got through to the generation of ‘digital natives’ currently having the time of their lives at uni that what you upload now may come back to haunt you years later. 

A helpful hint for enthusiastic uploaders – just ask yourself ‘would I want my parents or future employer to see this?’  If the answer is no, step away from the computer…

posted by gemmaT