The humiliation associated with seeing an old photo or video of yourself is a universal feeling that everyone has gone through at one point or another. Parents showing their child’s baby pictures to their friends or boyfriend, old home videos of bath time, revisiting childhood outfits that made you question your parents sanity for having put you in, the list is extensive. As time goes on, these chances for shame and humiliation via technology grow, as social media becomes part of the mix. Social media became a part of my life at an earlier age than it probably should have been. I chatted with friends on AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) and spent a good portion of my time rearranging my “Top 10” friends list on MySpace according to who my best friends were that particular week. By the end of middle school, Facebook had made a name for itself in the world of social media, and I had hopped on the bandwagon.
Facebook started off as something great. It was intended to be a place to reconnect with friends, share accomplishments, ideas, and even cute cat videos, with everyone on your friends list. My emotional and melodramatic teenage self did not see it for these purposes, unfortunately. Instead, I used it as more of a public diary, which was quite an oxymoron. I used it as a place to vent, and to tell the world my troubles, even though the world really did not need to hear them. It was rare that I paid any consequences for these public rantings, as my family did not yet have Facebook accounts of their own, and I was not popular enough for anyone of significance to pay attention to what I had to say online. This carefree phase would come to a close soon enough, as I finished up my sophomore year of highschool and started what would be the most significant relationship I would ever have. Up until that year, my relationships were short and catty for the most part. The longest relationship I had been in was a whopping four months, and that was impressive for an underclassmen. When I found myself in a relationship with my fast friend, Tobias Lloyd, I didn't immediately think that there was anything different about it. I had met him freshman year, when he sat behind me and slept through our American Sign Language class, only waking up long enough to look annoyed and check the clock. When our paths crossed again the summer of my sophomore year, we started dating and saw each other nearly every day. Social media, texting, and other forms of technology were not a part of our relationship in the beginning. It was summer, and we had better things to do than sit inside on a computer or phone. It wasn’t until the summer came to a close and we went back to our usual lives, where we saw each other much less frequently, that I learned that the way I was used to “dating” someone and solving conflicts was not going to cut it any longer. It was common practice for relationships in our high school to take place mostly over text messages and facebook statuses and shared links. It was a difficult adjustment to go from seeing each other face to face every day, to only seeing each other in passing. When we didn't see eachother every single day, but we were sure that we needed to, we made up for it by texting each other constantly. This is where I learned that sometimes, texting is not the best form of communication. In an attempt to tell Tobias everything that I would have told him if I saw him in person, I typed out paragraphs worth of messages that recapped every thought and event that happened to me during the day. When he would finally answer back with short and concise responses, I was instantly annoyed. Why didn't he put in the time and effort to respond to every detail of my message? At the time, it didn't even occur to me that someone could make a point in less than three paragraphs. The very next day, I would make it a point to act as sulky as possible when I passed him in the halls, even though he never seemed affected by it. Tone also came into play as time went on. When speaking to someone in person, it is easy to control the type of voice used and facial expressions used in order to convey emotion. When texting, emailing, or using other forms of digital written communication, it is not as simple, and tone and meaning can become lost in translation. Emojis can make up for some of the lost emotion, but even they can be misinterpreted. Additionally, some people like Tobias, think that emoji’s are pointless, and for the most part, refuse to use them in conversation. It was around this time that technology began to take its toll on our relationship. Some of our worst fights took place over text messages, which wasn't the best way to hash out a problem, but it was at least still just between the two of us. These fights were almost always ignited by me, and it embarrasses me to reflect on them knowing what I know now. The arguments we had were almost entirely digitally based. I would lose my temper over the most absurd things, and Tobias would suffer the consequences. A frequent argument we had concerned my obsession with long winded messages. If Tobias didn't respond to every detail of my digital essay, I was offended. If he did not write his own digital essay about his day, I was offended. If he did not make me his Woman Crush Wednesday (#wcw), I was offended, despite the fact that I knew he rarely even thought about using social media. As time went on, I continued my antics with no difference. Each time I would lose my mind over something small, Tobias would text me the same logic based responses to try and make me see reason. I hated it. At the time, all I wanted was for him to crumble and apologize like every other guy I had dated. Typically, I would throw a fit and the person I was with would give in to whatever it was that I wanted, to keep me happy. Yes, I was a brat. With Tobias, things were different. He had a backbone, and had no problem telling me no when it came to my ridiculous requests and breakdowns, which was something that I really had not heard before. As a bratty teenager, I refused to step back and think about the situation. I wanted my way, and that was that. Instead of listening to Tobias, and thinking about things logically, I chose to ignore him and think about things emotionally. Sigh. If he wouldn't listen to me over text messages, maybe he would listen to me over social media. Fueled by anger, I would jump to my computer and write a status to show everyone how upset I was. As Tobias pointed out, they were always as anonymous as possible, in order to avoid any confrontation or blame on my part. Even though I thought these statuses would make him feel guilty, they actually made him very annoyed. “Showing all the happiness and everything [in a relationship] is fine but if you’re having arguments and stuff, that doesn’t belong out there for everyone else...That should be your own business that you should be able to solve with your own [significant other]. I just remember whenever there was an issue it would show up as anonymously as possible on social media. It made [the relationship] difficult because it wasn’t us solving our problems ourselves, it just became spouting our problems out” (Tobias Lloyd 2017). It took a while, but eventually I realized that this method of displaying our problems on social media was not in any way going to solve our problems. Instead, it was only making them worse. In the beginning, I thought that he was the stubborn one for not giving in to my ridiculous demands, but after a while, I realized that it was actually me. Posting our problems as a Facebook statuses only angered Tobias, and involved other people who should never have been aware of our problems in the first place. Once I realized this, I controlled myself when I became upset and worked it out one-on-one with him instead of making it public, and shocker, it worked.
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Michele Trimnell
This is where I record all of my research and drafts. Archives
March 2017
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