Social Media OVERKILL

This weekend I went to a national conference in Tulsa, OK for our school's programming board, SACA. Basically it was a conference for all the programming boards in the central region of the U.S. to gather and watch artists and performers that they may want to bring to their campuses. And there were also a few leadership sessions here and there.

WELL as soon as we got there, they kept pushing their different forms of social media on us to "help us be more involved with the behind the scenes stuff", mostly following them on twitter for conference updates. I for one was kind of annoyed by it. I'm not the biggest fan of twitter. Personally, theres just too#much@goingon#in a RT:sentence. <<< like that weird stuff. So anyways, I just went along with it because I could see how it MIGHT be useful. Well then it just kind of all exploded. Artists were going onstage and saying stuff that they saw on twitter and giving shout-outs about it and it was just annoying. Like okay okay, I get the internet is fun, but lets move on from it, theres just too much to keep up with! Oh and agents could tell when their artists were popular because of how many tweets they had. Okay, why can't you just determine that with how many contracts you actually sign?? #annoying.

Anywhos, well THEN at the closing banquet, they said that to find out the theme for next year's conference we would have to look at twitter. THAT really bugged me. When I'm sitting at a nice dinner, listening to awards being given and what not, the last thing I want to hear is "were not going to TELL you the biggest piece of news, were going to make you take out your phones and look for it!"

And that's where I had my realization, social media has officially taken over, but not necessarily in a good way. I remember when I used to go to conferences or retreats and using my phone was considered a bad thing. But now they're expecting us to replace REGULAR FACE TO FACE COMMUNICATION with social media usage over our mobile devices?! I mean I could see where its fun for a little bit, but I think its getting out of hand when it's predominately conversation through a website. And honestly, I don't mean to sound cliche or dramatic about it, but in a room full of over 500 people, I've never felt so alone because we were encouraged to use our phones more than our voices.

I NEVER thought I would feel this way about something that I thought was SO COOL. But I really think we need to tone it down and try to communicate with each other as humans again.

...OH! And guess what the theme of next year's conference is? SOCIAL MEDIA!!!!!!!

geez.