Me and the Buttons: a Bevvy of Social Accounts, and Anxiety

You know that metaphor about challenging times, where you talk about having to rebuild a plane while you are still flying it?

It's interesting how much social media feels like that, all the time. Right now I am having one of those moments where I feel like I am unscrewing the tail while rejiggering the wheels and talking to someone on the ground and, now, the metaphor is dying out.

Vintage Postage Stamp Social Media Buttons courtest of Dawghouse Design via Tutorial9.net

But suffice it to say, I'm just in the middle of a fairish-ly big life change—a new job—and it's making me stop and think about the accounts and channels and networks represented by the plethora of buttons on my toolbars, and just how to use them. And evento  try to retrace how they got there, over the last few years of my life.

I started this blog on Typepad in January, 2007, after just having moved back to Boston from Washington, DC.  As I went through that previous massive life change (city, job, friends, family), it was a way to reach out to a few people close to me but far away.  It was also a way to create a practice around writing and reflecting,  and a means to push myself to share a little of that work, against the grain of my tendency to put on a game face with much of the world.  Even if  the audience was only a few people. Even if it the audience was occasionally, only a theoretical one.

At times, I wove this space into my professional life, with occasional posts about the craft of web content, or, like so many others, used it to register a meta-comment on social media itself. But mostly I wrote about my life outside of work.  Though, at the same time, I generally found myself to shying away from using it as a form of reportage.  I've written about a hike, a film, a moment in political discourse or a glimpse of a neighborhood scene. But not, generally, about what I did at work this week, an argument in my family, worries about the economy or my bank account. Although, those realities must often have leaked through in what I did write, and especially in the many long gaps between posts.