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.