Social Media

I'm on a couple social media sites and for the most part they prove to be fun, informative, and a good communication tool.  Of course, like anything else they can be abused.  And in this day and age of connectivity, a lot of people worry about compromise of your personal info and think that using social media could only exacerbate this problem.  There is some validity to that but we have all become so connected with so much info in the web that I think if someone wants your info, they're gonna get it.  Strong passwords and diligence to things that are suspicious are musts, but we all are vulnerable.

I'm primarily on Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn and I guess you say this blog is a form of social media.  I also watch Twitter.  More on that later.  But I came across an article on social media and I was a bit astounded at how many sites there are.  This one article listed over 65.  Yikes.  That's a lot of energy going into what even 10 years ago did not even exist.  Makes you wonder how we existed without it.  Anyway, the top sites are:

• Facebook
• Twitter
• LinkedIn
• Snapchat
• Instagram
• Pinterest
• Reddit
• TikTok

You've probably heard of all these and all of them have some redeeming value.  Like I said, they are generally fun and informative.  If you have kids or grandkids, you definitely want to monitor what they are looking at and how they are engaging.  That is a must do.  There are programs out there that will allow you to monitor your kids activity.  Make sure you're taking advantage of them.  Because if you don't some cretin could be taking advantage of your kids.  Just sayin!

The one that stands out for me as the most dangerous is Twitter.  It is a cesspool.  Now I know that President Trump uses Twitter to get his message out and that's fine.  I still have an account and a couple times a week will browse through tweets to check out what people are saying.  The thing about Twitter is that it can be anonymous and incredibly nasty.  If you decide to engage on Twitter, don't take it too seriously because you never know who's really tweeting.  Every time I browse through Twitter I see the most idiotic and nasty comments.  But as I said, it can be an information source so I keep engaged.