#whyamisoobsessedwithsocialnetworking

My introduction to social networking came in 2005 with Bebo. I used it but I didnt do social networking on the internet much beyond that and videos of kitties on YouTube for a while.

Since then I appear to have accumulated a facebook, a twitter (deleted then recreated), two tumblrs, three youtube channels (one of them is inactive as I forgot the password), a formspring, a vimeo, a spillit, a vyou, a skype, various forum usernames, and this pretty little blog you see here (plus one blog that I had in 2008 and subsequently deleted). I deleted the bebo in 2010. I'm also probably forgetting some.

And, with varying degrees of frequency, I use them all. I am a social networking fiend. I have literally never committed to anything like I have committed to the internet. So, what the fuck is wrong with me, and indeed everyone else who overuses social networking?

I think the primary raison d'etre of social networking is abundantly clear: we want to know that we are not alone. There is huge comfort to be found on facebook. I post a status and other people care about my opinions and want to engage with me enough that they like and comment on it. I come across a page with thousands of likes and discover that I'm not crazy, lots of people will look in the fridge repeatedly when hungry expecting to find different food (let's leave aside for a moment that according to Einstein that's exactly what insanity is).

Perhaps I'm just self-obsessed. I post random tidbits from my day and rant about my opinion and answer anonymously submitted questions through various media and I hope that people will read and watch and comment and follow and interact with it because I'M SO FUCKING IMPORTANT AND INTERESTING.

And obviously, there is a bit of self-indulgence here. I probably wouldn't engage in these activities to the extent that I do if I didn't think that someone, somewhere, was picking up what I'm putting down.

But, for me, and I think for most people who engage in social networking (and there are quite a few of them), there's more to it than that. I like interacting with people and self-indulgent as it may be interacting is better than not interacting as far as I'm concerned. The world is changing and the internet is playing a huge part in that and I like seeing what's happening and feeling like I'm a part of that. I like looking at things that my friends, and indeed total strangers, are doing and creating and experiencing and though it seems a bit mundane at times, thats what life is, really; talking to people about their feelings and opinions and activities and how their girlfriend is and that really great pasta they had last week.

If I may indulge my Amanda Palmer obsession in the form of a case study for a moment....

She's a musician who is very active on twitter, maintains a blog, has a youtube account with a couple hundred videos on it and probably some other stuff that I'm not even aware of. For all intents and purposes, she's a celebrity. But instead of trying to distance herself from the hoi poloi she engages with them. She interacts with people on a basic level and tries to share as much of herself as she wants to, and it's created a new kind of celebrity in my opinion; just a cool girl who makes music and travels and shares these experiences with as many people as she can. She's grateful to her fans and I suspect that she's on a secret mission to let each of them know individually that she knows they're there, and appreciates it.

Obviously, not being a celebrity of any kind except for that one photo of me that got quite popular in canada, none of that applies to me. But like it or not the internet is really fucking big news these days and I want to be a part of it. Obviously, there's a line to tread here- no-one wants to hear about the cheese toastie I made this morning and no-one wants to hear about the corrective surgery I had for a rectal prolapse (for the record I have not had a cheese toastie today and have never had corrective surgery for a rectal prolapse). There's sharing, there's undersharing, and there's oversharing. Also, in an effort not to flood everybody with this shit, I segregate my social networking to a certain extent. I doubt whether any single person knows how to find all of the accounts/pages listed above. I'm not really sure I know how to find all of the accounts/pages I've created over the years. That way people see what they want to see, and dont have to engage with me on twenty different platforms. At least that's my intention.

In addition to this, let's face it, I plan on working in media, and social networking is changing the entire industry faster than you can shake your keys at. News is changing, books are changing, music is changing, films are changing, and most of it's going down on the internet. It would be stupid of me not to pay attention to and engage in what's happening in social media. 

Now if you'll excuse me I have to take my dailybooth photo and tweet so that people know this blog post exists. Get in touch.

The Cardinal Fuck-Up of Trying To Turn A Hobby Into A Job

The thing about me, right, is that I do an awful lot of things, creatively.

I play a couple instruments, I write, I draw, I paint, I make clothes, I take photographs, I do a lot of social-media type stuff, I cook, I take an interest in other people's art and food and social media-type stuff.

But I don't really do any of these things very well, very often, or very consistently. Most of them don't even qualify as hobbies because a hobby is something that you actually do with something resembling regularity.

But I do enjoy all of these things, and I wish I could do them all more, and better, but I can't because if I try and focus on music I'll get distracted and start making a dress, and if I start making a dress, all of a sudden I'll wanna go write a short story. This is a cruel chain of events that usually ends up with me cleaning my room and drinking lots of tea and going on the internet.

But filmmaking is obviously different. Because I decided to turn a hobby into a career (I hope), and study it at college, there's a pressure there. A huge amount of dedication is required in order to keep up and really get the most out of the experience. And the main problem, the thing that's worrying me most:

It's all starting to feel a bit like work.

Of course I enjoy making films and learning about how to do it properly and I enjoy writing scripts and I enjoy reading about the various things that I need to read about for my course. I just don't enjoy it as much when I have to have it done by a certain time and be graded. And, like I said, I have creative ADD. It's tough to stick to something this completely for this long.

I'm hoping I haven't fucked myself over. I'm hoping that by the time I get my degree I won't be so exasperated by the whole thing that I never want to pick up a camera again. I'm hoping that over the summer I'll get to do my own thing, filmically (it is a word, I checked) and fall back in love with it. If not I'll get some boring desk job and not really care about it and do all my creative type hobbies on the side. But that's not exactly what I'd like to happen.

I need to stop worrying so much.

Boozin', Prayin', and Learnin' (or, A Subjective Analysis of the Link Between My Alcohol Drinking Habits And My Last Year In Catholic School)

I had originally written about three quarters of quite a long blog post about my opinion of denominational primary education in Ireland, but then I realised that it was pretty boring and long and I wasn't really going anywhere with it, so I'll just stick to this one tidbit from sixth class.

When I was 12 and making my confirmation, we were all herded into a classroom after lunch and handed a piece of paper. It was the pledge. I don't remember the exact wording of it, but it was something along the lines of "I promise to God that I will never take drugs and will not drink alcohol until I am __ years of age. Signed, _____". We were told that we could fill in whatever age we wanted, but were strongly recommended to put 18. So far so good. I don't recall being informed that I didn't have to do this if I didn't want to. It's possible that I was and just plain don't remember, this happened like 7 years ago, but given my overall experience at school of being told when things were and weren't optional I don't think it's outside the realm of possibility that they just didn't say anything.

At this point I'm pretty sure we'd done some health education thing on drugs (I remember making a "pass on grass" poster). But that particular day it hadn't come up. All this pledge stuff was sprung on us. So I'll get to my main point: I am all for encouraging children to adopt healthy attitudes towards drugs from an early age. I see why never taking illegal drugs and not drinking until age 18 is a sensible concept to introduce to children. Great. What I'm not all for is this concept being introduced in the form of a covenant with God instead of a decision made independantly by the child after being taught about the consequences of drug and alcohol abuse.

I can't remember whether or not I was fully atheist at this point, but the fact of the matter is that once I realised that my beliefs differed from those that this pledge were based on, that agreement I had entered into was just a laserprinted piece of nothing.

I signed the bit of paper anyway, and I put down 13, figuring that at least I'd be able to keep that and still be able to have a sip of champagne at new year's and all the other little things like that. In the end I tried a bit of my Dad's Guiness a few months before my birthday and that was the end of that.

Pledge or no pledge, I ended up with very unhealthy drinking habits, some of which still remain. I started drinking at a very early age, in what I now realise were very unsafe circumstances. It took me a long time to find my limits, and even having found them I still exceed them on all too regular a basis. I'm not trying to play the blame game and I'm not suggesting that my primary school curriculum is at the root of all evil.

But I just think that I would have had a healthier attitude towards drugs, alcohol in particular, if I had been better educated about certain things earlier. Things like the strength of spirits, units of alcohol, body weight, what actually happens if you drink too much, the situations you can get yourself into. I think that the possibility of a naggin of vodka leaving me puking in the street would have scared me more at age twelve than "You shouldnt drink because drinking is bad and God doesn't want you to" ever did.

Again, obviously my secondary school had a responsibility, my parents had a responsibility, and above all I had a responsibility. My main point is just that what's the point in having substance abuse education at primary level at all if you're just going to ignore logic and bring religion into it?

How I got into feminism

For the purpose of clarity I'm going to start by saying that I was always a feminist. I can't think of a time in my life when I didn't believe that men and women should be equal for as long as I'd known that men and women could be treated unequally. But insofar as believing that men and women should be equal makes you a feminist, most everybody is a feminist.

When I talk about "getting into feminism" I'm talking about the time when I started to feel really strongly about it, and started to educate myself about ways in which women were treated in an unequal way, how we could go about changing that, and actively engaging in trying to make a change.

As a kid I was always vaguely pissed off when people assumed my favourite colour was pink, and that I couldn't play football (I wasn't good at football but this was more due to a total ineptitude at almost all sports on my part than to a lack of a Y chromosome). But around age 15 or 16 was when I started to get scared, upset and angry at how women are treated and began to try and take on a responsibility towards feminism.

I was in a mixed school and by now most of the year had reached sexual and intellectual maturity. What had previously been boys saying "get back in the kitchen" because it was just what you said to be controversial, and because they didn't know better, had become men who were smart enough to know what these jokes really meant about society's attitude toward women, making sexist jokes when they should have known better. I was sick of being told that I didn't know anything and should be making sandwiches in the name of humour by people trying to wind me up, and acting like I was overreacting when I did get wound up.

I was reading the prescribed feminist poetry for the Leaving Cert (cue more sexist jokes in English class) and it really got me thinking about what it meant to be an active feminist.

I was nestling into my own corner of the internet, outside of facebook and monkeys riding on the backs of baby pigs, and so I was reading and watching more about what feminists were saying and doing and thinking, and learning about what problems are around currently that were making us unequal, and what was being done about it. I read about anti-porn feminism, sex-positive feminism, slut shaming, women in the media. About rape culture. About burkas, genital mutilation, missing white woman syndrome. About women.

I had taken up debating at school but always found myself more engaged with debates at parties and in the back of class when we should have been working. "What's the harm in ___?" "What pay gap?" "I don't really think that, I'm just poking fun". I got very heated in these debates with all the furor of a teenager pissed off with the world looking for something to believe in.

By now I had "filled out" and was developing my own sense of style in how I dressed. Alcohol started showing up at house parties and I started going to pubs with my friends every once in a while. I was uncomfortable with the reactions I was getting in a social context. I was annoyed that I couldn't walk down the road without being beeped or whistled at. I was sick of strange men in bars trying to grab my arse. I was scared by stories from friends and peers and experiences of my own, which ranged from lads making inappropriate comments about about breasts to people being raped or almost raped. I was angry that I lived in a society where none of this was unusual.

So I educated myself about it. I tried to learn and understand specific ways in which society treats women unfairly. I learned about the way in which we're all products of a culture where there is a constant undercurrent of misogyny. I learned about what I could do, and I formed my own opinions on what I agreed with and didn't agree with, what really was "harmless fun" and what was just blatant sexism. To me that was the difference between being a "feminist" and an "active feminist". Engaging with it properly.

I'm not saying that I know everything. I'm not saying I'm somehow more of a feminist or any better of a feminist than anyone else. I'm just trying to explain how I got to this point, where I'm comfortable openly describing myself as "feminist", where I'm aware of ways in which people can be sexist without even realising it, and willing to call people out when they are sexist.

I'll wrap up by saying that feminism isn't about being angry. It isn't about hating men. It isn't just for women, or young people, or activists, or politics. It's for anyone that wants to be as informed as possible about the culture we live in, how that culture shapes us, and how we would like to shape that culture into an environment that's better for everyone. Go read a blog. Watch youtube. Google it. Find your stance (I'll probably write another post at some time in the future about key issues where there's division among feminists, and recommend some reading/listening/viewing material).

In fear of yuppiedom.

I'm going to give this blog thing another bash. It's going to be rambly and irrelevant and not very dependable and only interesting sometimes. It's going to be me, but on the internet.

Earlier today I wrote a film about fears. The biggest fear I have right now is that I'm going to wake up tomorrow and discover that I've become a 25-year-old yuppie who hasn't travelled much and has stopped giving a shit about feminism and art and all that other stuff I'm into right now that hopefully isn't some coming-of-age phase, because I like feminism and art and all that other stuff.

I had an English teacher once who said she regretted waiting around so long to write. That she had all these ideas for writing when she was younger and then decided not to write them because they sounded stupid but now she never can write them because she's not in that place anymore and she'll never feel that way again. That's resonating with me a lot lately because I keep rejecting film ideas and being afraid to make anything that's truly my own, because, well, they're shit ideas, but I'll never be the way I am now again, and I'll never have these shit ideas again, and maybe I should start making that into something. Because making a shit film is better than making no film and if I keep waiting around for a great idea I'll probably never make anything ever. If that makes sense.

And now is the time when I'm finally old enough to travel on my own and I should start doing that because I dont want to lose interest in travel. Mostly I need to just stop being afraid that I'm going to get mugged/raped in the middle of Prague for long enough that I actually manage to go to Prague.

And I should go to more art exhibitions, and films, and concerts. And I should really get back on track with the whole "throw out all the shit you haven't used in the last four years" jag I was on last month. Kind of almost minimalism, but not quite.

This is just a vague rambly worried to do list to stop me waking up tomorrow and being a 25 year old yuppie, and I could go on but there's a freshly boiled kettle downstairs and my room has to be cleaned and I have essays to do and the cat's taking a nap and I might go nap with him.