“Shout it” on social nets

Or “the irony of openly saying what you can’t say”

I’m not discovering anything if I say that (almost) everybody shares their thoughts to their Twitter followers, Facebook friends or blog readers, and most of the time nobody cares about it. First of all I’d like to say that this won’t give any answer about why is this happening. We can proceed.

Some of the most commonly called as “annoying” posts are those obviously intended to be read by one specific person or group as the rest of the world CLEARLY doesn’t give a shit! Bu let’s just think a moment about what’s happening:

Every time since we build a sentence in our minds that we want to communicate, we are thinking in one person (or more) who is meant to acknowledge what we are trying to say. I know is a little bit complicated written that way, I’ll try to clarify it:

Every message has a transmitter, a channel, a context and a receiver.

Cool! You see? It’s not that complicated after all. We are not done yet so keep going…

In this particular case, the channel is obviously the social networks, so I’m not focusing on that, and the context depends on the personality of the other two components and their relationship in certain period of time. We’ll skip that stuff because it has too many possibilities as persons and it’s not really the key point of this (relations kind of is, but we’ll reach that in a moment).

With that part clear we can now talk about the important part: People.

Most of us has been trough hard times in our lives, right? Everyone has been rejected as least once, everyone has lost and win at least once when it comes to human interaction. And we all know that some are more skillful with words than others.

It’s a bit mysterious how we feel safer saying to everybody what we would LOVE to say to just one person face to face, it’s way much easier to just type and click “post” than actually speaking, specially when the reaction of our words is actually pretty important. But let’s face it, there’s millions and millions of tweets, posts, blog entries and diaries been published everyday and no body can go trough his entire timeline everyday just waiting for a random message to appear and ALSO assume that that person in particular is the only one supposed to read the post, see the video, hear the song or whatever. It’s going to remain lost in the Internets graveyard. Get over it.

It’s also something hypocritical that I’m writing this, since according to this lines I’m expecting someone in particular to read this even knowing that it won’t happen and even worse is that in some cases (I’m gonna say like this) we don’t even realize why are we doing it, we just want to express our ideas, thoughts, etc. BUT not with everybody but one person (a few top).

Social networks have become a safe place for all the introverts out there that find it very difficult to speak directly and, in my opinion, it’s so easy to do it that way that we’re not challenging us anymore and it’s becoming more and more difficult to improve our human-human interaction skills.

Anyway, as I said before, since I’m not hoping for anyone to read this (also, I unfollowed a lot of my Facebook “friends” because I didn’t want to see what they do but also didn’t want them to get mad at me if I unfriend them) I don’t really see the point in going on with this post. If some day, some one reads this I hope he/she/it finds it interesting and helpful. Enjoy.

P.S.: And speak