Sometimes, when I’m alone, and sort of in my head, I see something, a moment happens, and I wish I could capture it with words.  I thought ~ maybe to get back to writing, to get back to hearing that creative voice in my head, I’d share some of those moments.

This was today.

It was early evening, the sun sinking in the sky, leaving swirls of rosy pinks and powder blues precipitating the inky darkness of a midwinter’s night.  I was driving home from the city, winding my way down the ribbon of Kelly Drive along the Schuylkill.  The river looked like glass with huge expanses covered in nearly transparent patches of ice.  Life felt calm, clear and crisp ~ like the air outside.

Yesterday, as I took yet another break in my day to flip mindlessly through my phone, I realized that social media had once again begun eating up my life.

It’s not that I don’t enjoy scrolling through photos and seeing the way people I know view the world ~ their likes, experiences, children, adventures. Or sharing what I believe are adorable pics of my man, my pup, my life.  It’s great.  And I love being on top of the news via 140 characters. Or ‘shouting out into the universe’ random, sometimes pithy things that are on my mind. I even like old school FB, and reading people’s thoughts on, well, everything. Sometimes, I even share my own.  I love all of those things.

But here’s the flip side ~ the reason that I took social media off my phone.  Because on some level, I find it a little creepy.  There are people I haven’t seen in years, and through FB I know all about them … and yet, not because I’m in touch, or because they necessarily know that I’m reading all their updates (even though they are putting them out there for all to see) … but because I can, theoretically, know all about a person via their social media profile without putting any effort whatsoever into maintaining a friendship.  On top of that, instead of being ‘in‘ my life, I have moments when I take a picture, or type a thought that is nearly completely unrelated to anything I am doing ~ it just seemed photo/tweet-worthy.  So then, all of a sudden, I’m living my life for Instagram, or Twitter, or Facebook.

I find all that a little weird.  And a little uncomfortable when I think too much about it.

And then I realize that instead of talking to the real, live people around me, I’m being anti-social and involved with my phone … and that just compounds the weird, uncomfortable thing.

Our culture is changing ~ that’s inevitable, and it’s, well, life.  Today I interviewed a man who was hoping, after finishing college, to study the psychology of social media on this first, incredibly technology-based generation.  Which I found fascinating, and so on point after my deletion of social media on my phone.  But it also made me wonder ~ are we on a path that will require social media to interact?  Is that where society is headed?  No longer knowing people face-to-face, but instead knowing the image they project through their online profile(s).

Listen, I’m not quitting completely ~ that would be crazy (especially in my line of work ~ and doesn’t that emphasize how important those avenues are after short amount of time in existence?).  But I do think that I allowed online living to take precedence when it shouldn’t ~ so now, when I have WiFi on my iPad, I’ll catch up on my feeds.  But otherwise, I want to spend time reading, and writing, and plunking away on my new keyboard.  And hopefully that means that the relationships I have are real, and when someone tells me a story, I haven’t already read/seen it online.

Maybe I’m old-fashioned.  But I’m okay with that.