Social Media - good or bad?

Ok - I understand the irony of blogging about the evils of Social Media and promoting said blog via Facebook.
These are 2 articles that caught my attention on my FB feed this week.

Quit Social Media. Your Career May Depend on It.

By CAL NEWPORT NOV. 19, 2016 - an article on the NY Times site

and

Hootsuite - an advert for an app to help me manage all my social media needs in one place.

All this while I have been reading the novel Blind Faith by BEN ELTON

SO people have been telling me to build my brand and that I MUST have an online presence. It's the only way to progress my creative career. Go for a job and people google you and check out your FB page, Instagram, linked in, twitter... I am sure the list goes on. I have done it myself. Does anybody else find it annoying when you are trying to find the details for that meeting/lunch/coffee/orgy you booked in and cant for the life of you remember which platform you received this info. So you scroll though text messages, emails, What's app, FB messages, FB events, Twitter, Tinder and I have even checked my Words with friends conversation - all to find out that the details were given to me face to face and I jotted them down correctly in my calendar.

A friend of mine recently quit Facebook. It was too distracting and she was wasting too much time on it. After a month she has no regrets and feels better about herself for doing so. She now has more time to actually LIVE LIFE. I am starting to see her point. I have always kept my posts quite generic and not too personal. SO if I wish to communicate with her I text or call and I even pop in for a visit!

[* a FB notification just popped up and mid sentence I was about to check it. This is what social media has done to us. ps - I finished the sentence before checking it.]

I realised just how many people were able to see where I was, who I was with and what I am doing so I censor it now. Just as I have censored this blog.

Don't get me wrong, it has it's good points. I love that I can share and connect with friends far and near and I somehow feel like I know something about their lives even if I haven't been in it for over 20 years. But I still prefer a phone call or a face to face meet up. Nothing can beat a real human connection with a person.

Work colleagues are on there now - this is a nice grey area isn't it? Among my FB 'friends' are close friends, family, work colleagues, vague connections with friends of friends who I may have met once upon a time. This leads to a whole other topic of when do work colleagues become friends? I will admit that there are people among my FB feed that I don't actually like. And I am sure the feeling is mutual but its not about liking people, it's about collecting the most amount of friends isn't it? 

 How much of what you post do you think people actually read?

The more time we spend emoting about ourselves and posting photos of our lunch where do you find time to read everybody else's  updates and see what they are all having for lunch? Both the NYT article and Ben Elton's novel pose this question. It makes you think And I don't know if I like it that way. Will I quit - no, probably not. "They" wont let me.

SO if you take the time and get to this sentence in my blog - Thank you.