Un-Baby Me!!!!

I don't know why I still do it. It usually happens like this. I wake up and pour a cup of coffee, sit in the only chair I own, pick up the Kindle and then tap on that big blue 'f ', and scroll through the myriad of statuses and pictures and more recently, colored opinions on the life and times of every politician, court rulings, and social and moral positions. What is very strange to me is that I am firmly planted in the middle of two very different cultures, and worlds for that matter. I have my Miami group which can easily be divided into several smaller sectors, and the Southern group, which is pretty much unified.

What is really interesting to me is the vast differences in the way that people go about posting on social media. As different are the actions between the two in real life, there is just as much differences that is shown on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram etc. Obviously the Southern crown tends to lean to the more conservative while the Miami crowd tends to lean to the more....'I really don't care'. Another big difference that portrays the lives of the two is that in Miami, people tend to be 'younger'. Basically, graduation, jobs, life, family, moving out, tends to all happen later in life. And when my Southern friends are posting pictures of the first meal that the husband cooked in the new house, Miami is posting pictures of a three (sometimes four) generation family meal where all three live under the same roof.

But lately the gap between the two have been shrinking. Eventually graduation happens, eventually a Job is landed, and even people move out. The pictures then begin to melt into one theme. Statuses tell the same stories. Instagrams are being substituted by 5, 6, or even 7 pictures in a row of your night out. Take a picture.....chill. Take a picture.....chill. All of this leads to a social media experience that is really.....well boring. Not to say that your life is boring or that you are posting shouldn't be posted (don't worry I will address how I am part of the problem soon enough), I'm just saying that the variety of all of your lives that made this experience such a ground breaking thing seven or so years ago, is gone. It blended together and I've just grown uninterested in the general uniformity of it all.

However, we are the first generation on Social media ( facebook was college only when it started, remember?) and there are no rules. That generation is now settling down, some faster than others. It is bound to happen, right? But should it? I'm really down on social media (though you found this post through my Facebook) and if I hadn't put so much work into showing you only the best highlights of my life, or only updating my status when I have something clever to say, then I just would be done with it. But I can't because this is how life is now....though and screen or monitor. You're kids are getting older and are increasingly finding their way through my unbaby.me app. And I will continue to post about how bad the Keystone XL pipeline and we will all just float on writing and re-writing the rules of social media until we merge together in one big life experience.

~Brett


If you have made it this far, there is an app that works to filter baby pictures. It's called unbaby.me . What it does is when it detects key words like 'daddy' 'baby' 'year old' it replaces that picture with something of your choosing. I chose surfing pictures. Now it has an undo button for a case by case posts. Like when Olivia shows up, I always undo that and if you have that special kid you want to see, it won't block it. However, lately, those babies that i blocked two or three years ago, are now toddlers and finding their way into my feed. time to update the key words.