A Very Shy Snail

Social networking: I’m doing it wrong

I’m really not made for social networking. I have Twitter, Facebook and, obviously, Tumblr, but though I’m sure I found the former two exciting once upon a time, I now only use them if I get a message or need to play a game of ‘locate the flatmate’. As for the latter, well, more on that later.

The truth is that I just don’t really care what the people I happen somehow to be following on Twitter or Facebook have had for breakfast (or whatever), and I’d like to think that my own followers don’t much care to read a documented account of my every action and thought, either (to think they might do otherwise is actually vaguely sinister…) 

Very few of my actual, real life, corporeal friends use the internet much at all (seriously, I communicate with one of them by letter) and I rather assume that those that do will tell me personally if they do something they want me to know about. If I want to know how they are, I’ll generally ask them rather than attempting to stalk them for a day to find out. I’m a bit of a traditionalist like that.

And then there’s Tumblr… Now, it’ll come as no surprise to anyone with even a passing knowledge of my blog that my interests are, in general, very, very specific, and not ones that are frequently tagged. This renders the whole concept of a dashboard somewhat obsolete for me since the chances of my coming across a post that might be considered worth hours of trawling through a system that seems to take a quite sadistic pleasure in freezing on anything that I especially didn’t want to see.

If something appears at the top of my dash and looks interesting, then I might like or reblog it, but I certainly wouldn’t feel that the world was about to crash down around my ears if I missed something. Indeed, if it wasn’t for the persistent hope that, one day, someone other than me might start consistently posting to the tags that I follow, I’d probably just give up with it altogether. For me, Tumblr is a means of creating bizarre projects and converting people to the worship of a certain actor sharing my passions with a rather more receptive audience than I might find outside of this virtual realm.

Through these things I have made some good friends, so I can’t really regret having joined Tumblr but could someone please, please improve it! I want to be able to filter things without using the (frequently reluctant) Tumblr Savior, to reply to comments without needing the ‘highly suspect’ (so Tumblr keeps informing me) Missing e, to comment on posts, in general, to post pictures in text posts without having to upload the little buggers and, most of all, I want Tumblr to finally understand that, if I post a picture post, it’s generally of a person I prefer with a head!