Melissa Writes

Oh bloggy friends it’s been a weekend.  I haven’t been sleeping well, which is making me emotional and to top it off the meds that should help me are only making me not sleep more.  I’ve had three hours of sleep in the past 36 hours so bear with me.  When I can’t sleep I think.  I’ve been thinking if the social media scene is really any different than a large high school.

I have to admit I have absolutely no experience with large high schools.  I graduated with twenty-one other people.  I’d known most of them since kindergarten.  We had groups, I wouldn’t call them cliques because everyone overlapped. It wasn’t taboo to sit at a different lunch table, party with different people each weekend or any of that other stuff.  My knowledge comes from T.V., movies, and stories from friends who did go to big  schools.

I have three social media accounts, myspace, Facebook, and Twitter.  Every once in a while I log into a Nascar message board too.  I never logged into Myspace anymore.  Facebook is my everyday friends.  I would guess that 95% of the people on Facebook I know in person.  I went to school with them, I met them in my college days, I work with them, or they are family.  I’ve never met a single person on Twitter, well I do follow a couple of people I know but they never tweet so I don’t count them. lol  My husband calls my Twitter addiction a place for my inner geek to come out.  All of the Facebook people who know me, know about my inner geek.  I just don’t get to talk geek with them.  On Twitter though, I can surround myself with people of like interests.  I’ve got the news/weather group, the Topeka group, the artistic group, the people I like chatting with most of them supply me with computer/tech news, the Celiac group, the Nascar group, and the HVAC group.

As I became more interested in Twitter and started branching out into finding people to follow other than the local news people, I started very simply.  I found twittergrader.com, found the top 50 people in Topeka, read their bios and followed anyone that sounded interesting to me.  I’ve followed people that I don’t exactly agree with, but that doesn’t mean that I can’t learn something from one of their tweets or connect with them on another issue.  One of my first new twitter friends said something about educating, enlightening, and engaging others would get you farther in the Twitterverse.  That’s when I began talking to others, retweeting things I found interesting, and posting things I thought were important.  Because of that small piece of advice, I’ve went from 10 followers to over 300 followers in the last month or so.  Twitter life was fun.  That’s how I was able to set up all those different groups.

Now how does all this relate to high school?  Glad you asked because here it goes.  Since, I went to a small high school there weren’t enough people to have your football jocks, your basketball jocks, your band geeks, drama geeks, ag people, ect.  We were all those things. lol  Everybody had something to do with the sports teams, the place to be on game night was at the game in some way.  When the FFA group left there was like five people left in the building.  I never and still don’t understand the thought that you can’t belong to different groups with varying interests or that all of your friends must be friends too.  If two people don’t get along then you have to pick one or the other.  Sorry not this girl, I don’t go for the clique thing and people who think that way really irk me.

Now what prompted all this?  Two disagreements with one person.  The first I thought nothing of, it was a simple difference of opinion in my mind.  I saw it as one thing the other person saw as something else.  No biggie, I have differences like that all the time with other friends, even my husband.  Then we had another disagreement over what something is called.  We aren’t talking the end of the world here folks.  After the second disagreement I get bombarded with direct messages from this person.  I stood by my original statement.  After the 9th direct message I was irritated.  I made a comment in general stream about people thinking everyone who put a youtube video up being an expert.  Then I get the tenth direct message of the day, this one saying I used to be cool until I got under the influence.  I didn’t get it.  I don’t drink and I don’t do anything illegal.  I couldn’t figure out the influence I was under.  I admit it I’m a little dense sometimes.  :-)

Because I was dense and upset I e-mailed another twitter friend, just to do some venting.  I started to get it, I have become friendlier with the second person in recent weeks.  We are both home during the day, his wife and I went to high schools 20 miles apart that played each other, so we had a working knowledge of each other.  Plus we are close in age.  For me that’s a new thing, I normally hang with people older so meeting a couple my age with similar interests excited me.  During that e-mail exchange I found out that the two people did not get along.  The second person had never said a word to me about that until I asked.

I thought it was silly.  I mean someone could think I was suddenly a different person because I started talking to someone else that they didn’t get along with.  HELLO HIGH SCHOOL!!  Later that night the first person was doing a webcast, I thought I would log in.  I was having problems logging into the chat but I could watch, so I did.  The next thing I knew my other friend and I were the topics of discussion.  I was shocked.  I sent a quick direct message to tell the person that if that person was going to talk about me, they should keep the story straight and tuned out.  I went to bed and couldn’t sleep.  So back to the computer I came tuned back into the webcast.  Well, guess what I was the topic of discussion again.  I was appalled.  I’m being called hurtful things by his little group of friends.  I had had it.  I couldn’t take it and sent a series of direct messages to the person telling them how rude I thought they were being.

I have thought a lot about it since then.  I was hurt.  I had never experienced that kind of torement from someone who was supposed to be a friend.  Then I realized this was nothing more than a high school like moment that others had talked about.  I was the new kid in school that become friends with the two rivals.  The one who thought I needed to make a choice and the one who didn’t.  I still haven’t made a choice, I don’t think I should.  However, the damage done to the first relationship may never be healed.