Are we too connected to be connected?

Well obviously today is special because I like numbers and 11-1-11 is pretty neat. Just wait for ten more days and I might throw a party for the date! (At least in my head I will). 

Anyway, I've been thinking. Is social media bringing us closer together or further apart? Let me explain.

Today I saw that I had some new followers on Instagram. I was instantly excited and thought, now we can share our little moments with each other via photographs. But then I thought, well why not show each other things in person? Why not talk in person? Why not call each other instead of rely on each other's blogs or social media sites to find out what's been happening? 

Well there could be some reasons:

1. It's easier to check for updates on your phone than to schedule a date and block out hours of your night to hang out during the week.

2. With the internet, you can see (at once) what many people are doing rather than one person or a small group of people. 

3. With blogs, you get a larger sense of what is going on at a particular time. When you meet someone in person, you don't talk about all the little things that go through your head when things happen. 

4. You get to see another side of a person that sometimes is difficult to capture in real life.

5. You are essentially still having alone time, while being sort of social.

But then again...

1. We hermit ourselves.

2. Internet can be impersonal and you miss the body language, tone, pitch, everything that physical, real communication gives.

3. You read things so you already know what's going on, so you don't feel as much need to ask.

4. Sometimes people don't sound like themselves in writing and you wonder what the deal is. This is why I particularly enjoy reading  blogs where I can hear the person saying things out loud. (She's pretty good at sound effects).

5. It's a double life. In my case, a triple life. (This one, the other one, the real life). But I try to be genuine in all of them. I keep thinking of merging my blogs so I don't have so many selves, but then I couldn't go deep into thought like I do on this one, and I couldn't focus so much on fashion and music as the other one. So there. I gotta keep 'em separated. 

In any case, I obviously enjoy being online and getting the inside scoop on people I know, and sometimes people I don't. (The people I don't have a lot to offer in terms of style, projects, insight).  Who knew that you didn't need experts to tell you everything, but instead, real people who do things and see things and write about them?

Whatever you do, make sure you step out of the virtual life and into the one you've led up until before you had all of these technologies. And then go sit down at your computer and keep on reading. :)

Hold the Phone.

Today I committed one of the biggest crimes. I talked on the phone, I set the phone down, I did some stuff, I left to pick my sister up from the car dealer in an area I was unfamiliar with, I reached for my phone to look for directions, and realized: I forgot my phone at home.

Since I was already too far into my drive, I forged ahead for what felt like forever. First of all, traffic in the morning was just that: traffic. So after feeling a little bit of panic for each slow mile I drove, I tapped into my memory to try and figure out where this place could be. Suprisingly, I got there to find my sister in the waiting room, ready to kill greet me. 

For the rest of the day, I lived without my phone.  No checking for texts from the boyf, no playing phone cribbage on break, no looking at my email even though I already checked it on the computer. What's worse is that I wanted to meet my friend at her new place, so I had to find her on gmail and get her phone number because, yeah right, like I remember a phone number that has an out-of-town area code. Then I had to write the number down (with a pen! on paper! OMGah) and borrow phones and the calls didn't go through and I didn't end up meeting her.

I couldn't even send illegal texts if I wanted to. And this frustrated me almost all day long. Even though I spent the majority of my day plugged into my computer for work, I still felt deprived. 

So is being plugged in all of the time a good thing or a bad thing or somewhere in the middle? I am constantly checking all of my seven-thousand social media sites and finding that not much has changed. Even more, when the internet tubes are tied up and not properly operating at the speed of light, I mildly freak out. Do you stay plugged in for most of the day? Do you ever find yourself checking your phone when you can barely lift your eyelids? Why?

Technology is only advancing and soon we're going to have chips in our brain that read our thoughts and post to Twitter. Just kidding. Kind of.

But honestly, how much is too much? Is there such a thing?