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dustyoselfoff-anyouloveagai-blog · 14 years ago

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Time to share a fear of mine.

I'm terrified that, based on my alma mater for high school and the college from whence I shall matriculate, I'm going to grow up and see someone's name that I recognize from classes with them and realize that I absolutely hated them back then. Like one of my biggest fears is that I'll have gone to school with a future president and that I'll have hated him/her big time and that he/she will be the better candidate out of the pool and that I'll have to fight disliking them because there are people that have fucked me over so hardcore that the grudge will never entirely die.

#trivialproblems

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hellodianewang · 10 years ago

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A seemingly trivial dilemma..

I spent an inordinate amount of time yesterday trying to figure out what I should update my Instagram handle to (formerly @dianerrrs). This seems abnormal, and I couldn’t believe how much thought I put into this.

Because nowadays, our social media handles are our identities. Your handle is your new name. And unlike our real birth names, they must be unique. My name, dianewang, had long been taken by the time I tried to create my accounts on Instagram or Twitter. Workarounds for this are plenty, there are middle initials, words introduced such as thisis or mynameis. What can you do? There’s only one @dianewang, just as there’s only one @gap. It’s actually quite challenging to own your domain, Instagram and Twitter handles with consistency.

So I did some A/B testing and managed to unfortunately screw with quite a few people that were @ing me and starting conversations. (There really never is a good time to test a name). But in order for me to feel out my new handle, I had to change it and see how it felt in my feed. I came up with either using

@_dianewang

@dianebwang,

which coincidentally, is also my Twitter handle.

The rational and logical thing to do is go with consistency, dianebwang. But there’s a part of me that likes the aesthetic of _dianewang in Instagram, even though underscores are generally shunned. Trying to @ someone with an underscore in their handle generally feels tougher than it should. Who knew picking a name would be so hard?

Trickling down into a rabbit hole, I thought a little about how social media is integrated in our lives, and how it’s actually hard to focus on more than one medium. Personally, my main focus is Instagram. I will follow, comment, and post my own things on Instagram. This leaves me little time to do the same, but different things on Twitter (written medium), let alone Facebook. My Facebook has been relegated to something I log into to read updates from friends and what they’re sharing (similar to Twitter). But really, I’m only logging in by habit.

Do people need a handle on every social media? Maybe? Will they all combine one day into a huge conglomerate of a “feed” that gives us everything we need throughout the day? What is the point of signing up for ten different apps in order to get separate notifications from all of them? Will Apple manage to fuse them all together? The notifications center is already a prelude of having this information in one place. There’s definitely only a finite number of apps one person can be fully engaged with - so as a user, we have to pick our battles. Do I care that my Instagram and Facebook handles are different? Maybe not - I’ve seen successful power users of both platforms use different handles. But if we’re looking forwards to a fully integrated social media system, then yes, I do care.

And now the issue I’m struggling with is the fact that my Facebook username is unchangeable from dianerrrs for some odd reason. I guess you can’t have it all.

#100daysofwriting #daythree #trivialproblems #socialmedialife

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