Why Do I Bother!? (About Online Social Situations)

In order to describe what I think characterizes a successful online social situation, I think it will be somewhat easier to start with the characterization of an unsuccessful online social situation. Both because the human brain seems to pay more attention towards the negative and also because it's my response to unsuccessful online social situations that have been the starting point for getting myself thrown into this ethnographic exploration of my social media use in the first place.

So what characterizes an unsuccessful online social situation?
Let me try and answer that by describing the last time I engaged in an online social situation - and actually felt it affect my mood and made my stomach hurt (in an emotional sense).

Last night I posted a comment on a post inside a closed group on Facebook. The content of both the post and the comment was about something work related and is in fact not that important. However what is important is that from the moment I posted the comment, I was expecting a response. In fact I was expecting several responses from the other group members. The comment was both relevant, important and questioning (at least that's how I felt about it when posting). But as it turned out, no one in the group seemed to think the same. No one has responded to my comment yet (and it has been 22 hours by now), although several comments have been made referring to the overall post. Every time a red flag lets me know about activity in the closed group, I rush to check whether the new comment or like is a response to my contribution. It wasn't. It isn't. And perhaps it never will be. My comment stands alone; unanswered. And the interesting (yet frustrating) fact about it is that I'm actually a bit upset about it. My lonely comment represents me and the fact that no one cares to respond, reminds me of being rejected in a social setting as a child. It reminds me of getting picked last for football in 3rd grade and not getting invited to the girls' slumber parties in the 6th grade. It feels like talking - but then second-guessing whether my words actually translated into audio (or text), or if they just stayed inside my head. It in fact makes me think about not belonging (cf. Maslow 1987)

This all sounds very dramatized, performed and overreacted, but I've chosen to be totally honest about it, since this actually affects me. And the whole point of paying attention to my social media use is to be straight-forward about both my activities and my reactions towards the activities (or in this case: the lack of activities). So I guess that is what this post is. A piece of diary-like honest-to-the-bone, social confession.