MY BOYFRIEND CAN’T SEE THIS: Why Social Media Will Kill My Relationship (part 1)

16/10/2012
Social Media
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LEGAL STALKING

A few weeks ago, the ladies at Pamflet asked me to speak at the London launch of Emma Koenig’s FUCK! I’M IN MY TWENTIES. It’s amazing, buy it. Anyway, I used this as an opportunity to find out what the audience thought of my online behaviour towards my boyfriend. They thought I was less of a psycho than I’d anticipated so I thought ‘sod it’ and turned my talk into a series of blog posts. This is part 1. And my boyfriend has now seen this.

I freak out every time my boyfriend wants to use my MacBook for something. I usually smack his hand away before he even has a chance to move the mouse to Chrome. I’d definitely rather accidentally break his DJing hand or whatever than see the look on his face if he discovered the dark secret that lies in wait on my home page if I haven’t cleared my browsing history in the last forty five minutes. But I’m not having a raunchy affair conducted entirely through Facebook chat, I don’t have a shameful past that could be revealed by an unfortunate email at any moment and there is no addiction to obscure pornography that could be exposed with a simple mistyped URL. The truth is far worse: my most visited sites will undoubtedly always be his Facebook and Twitter profiles.

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THIS USER DOES NOT EXIST: Confessions of a Twitter Addict who Deactivated Twitter

06/09/2012
Social Media
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Hi. My name’s @littlemisswilde and I’m completely addicted to social media.* Social media addiction is starting to become recognized as a legitimate thing, and I’ll happily start attending group recovery when that becomes commonplace. But most people wouldn’t even realise that they have a problem. Being completely obsessed with my own behaviour, I did. So back in April, when I had a dissertation to finish, I deactivated all of my social networks and deleted all of the accompanying apps (this includes Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and DrawSomething**) for 4 days. And, as expected, I didn’t cope very well.

I don’t have any inbuilt self control and the replacement provided by Mac only comes in 24 hours doses and isn’t available on iPhone yet, so such a dramatic step really was the only way I could get those 8000 words in on time. This is a timeline of the symptoms I experienced for what was genuinely the most traumatic 72(ish) hour period of my life, which is essentially a storify of the #IRL Twitter feed I was keeping in the back of my dissertation notebook. Yes, really.

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A little bit about Youth Unemployment

27/08/2012
For someone else, What I'm up to
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So filming has started for the new series of Channel 4′s Battlefront and this time round there’s only one campaign – the fight against youth unemployment. I wrote a blog post to introduce what it’s all about. It’s a pretty non-contentious issue at this stage (essentially we have no future) but have a read anyway.

http://battlefront.channel4.com/campaign/guest-blogger

There are also some nicely airbrushed photos of me and they call me a ‘social media queen’ in the introduction which always brightens my day, obviously.

Social Media and the London Olympics

27/07/2012
Social Media
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This isn’t an analysis of the relationship between The Internet and The Games, just an opportunity to share some comedy gold I’ve stumbled across that links London 2012 and various social networks. You know, in case people want to take time out from slapping down Boris and observing how crowded the city is on Facebook and Twitter.

First up, the lowdown on the digital strategy* for the Games from BBC2′s Twenty Twelve (from a brand manager who is actually scarily similar to me. Excluding the attachment to MySpace. Ok including the attachment to MySpace. Whatever):

And secondly, someone from the Daily Mail dwelling on Twitter and the Games here.

NB: Only one of these is actually supposed to be funny.

ENJOY! And happy #London2012 everyone!

Why LOL Shouldn’t have had a straight-to-DVD release

14/06/2012
Social Media
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NB: This post isn’t actually about the Miley Cyrus film, it’s actually about films in general and how they forget about the Internet. Until now. Sort of.

Okay so it wasn’t exactly straight-to-DVD, but the Lionsgate website said it was only showing in ‘select theatres’ which translated to about 8 cinemas showing it last week, mainly at 11:40am in obscure parts of London with no advertising at all, except Miley’s casual engagement announcement. Unsurprisingly then, the cinema was half-empty and every single person in there was a Miley fangirl/boy, myself included. Which may prompt you to think that this review (it’s not really a review) will be incredibly biased. But I was so prepared for this film to be awful* and it just wasn’t. LOL is, without a doubt, the best teenage coming of age rom-com I’ve seen in a really, really long time.

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Life Offline

13/04/2012
What I'm up to
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Just a quick note, on the off chance that anyone is looking for me in cyberspace: I’ve deactivated my social media profiles so that I can get some work done. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Draw Something were proving too distracting, but I’ll be back soon to update you excessively on what I’m doing, or more likely what I’m not doing.

I know we joke (with undertones of complete sincerity) about my addiction to and reliance on social media that goes far beyond that of your average 21 year old in this generation, and I probably should seek help for that at some stage, but this is just a temporary measure.

The first 24 hours have been emotional to say the least, so expect a full post on withdrawal in the life of a social media addict as soon as I’ve finished this degree. I’ve been livetweeting it all in a notebook, with a pen.

Hope the Internet’s treating you well.

P.S. My Google+ profile is still active and no amount of longing to network has made me start trying to use it just yet.

EDIT – I just saw the empty sidebar of my blog where my tweets would be and the error message made me sob. That would have been a tweet.

Why I’m deleting half of my Facebook friends before 2012

31/12/2011
Social Media
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“Facebook is a social utility that allows you to procrastinate by scrolling through a constantly updating stream of photos of pasta, cryptic updates and endless event invites from people you met once three years ago and haven’t spoken to since.”

I have 816 friends on Facebook. 816 friends? Real friends, defined in the OED as: ‘One joined to another in mutual benevolence and intimacy’? No Jessica, even you, life and soul of every party, ultra-social being and all round great girl, cannot claim to have 816 friends.

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