my [reluctant] relationship with social media

I am of the age that I consider the “cusp” generation.  We were right on the cusp of the .com boom and were there for the beginning of the social media explosion.

I can remember being a kid at my parent’s home on our gigantic family desktop computer logging on to that dial-up sound of AOL, anxiously awaiting the line to connect and always hoping to hear “you’ve got mail.”  (A phrase, by the way, that would make my English-major-mother cringe but would give me a thrill every time I heard it.)  I would spend hours idling my time away in chat rooms with strangers I had never met.

When I was in college, I studied abroad for a semester in London.  I wrote email updates regularly and IM’d back home to all my friends and family about my adventures.  My college friends in Arizona told me about this new site they were all on called Facebook.  Since I wasn’t there and I didn’t know anyone who was on Facebook in London, I never really got into it while I was in school.

Then I graduated from college and there was My Space and then Facebook opened up for everyone (not just college students) and many more social media sites came and went.  For most of this time, I kept to the sidelines, not wanting to try to keep up with each new form of communication or to bear my soul on the Internet.  I suppose my reservations were mostly for fear of lost time, productivity, and quite frankly, privacy.

Lately, I find myself in a new relationship with the World Wide Web.  The world at large moves so fast now with all of the new forms of media and technology.  I think there will always be a part of me that yearns for it to slow down and to turn off the break-neck pace of modern life.  I wish I could keep away all the negativity and inevitable bad apples that come with the filter of a computer screen between us.  But I know I won’t always be able to.   At the same time I have come to terms with the fact that the progression of technology will continue to change at an ever rapid pace regardless of whether I sit on the sidelines or not.  I now am an Instagram addict and Pinterest pinner.  I get the same small thrill out of checking my feeds every day as I once did waiting for that dial up noise to connect.  I find and connect with other people like me all over the world and it makes up a new kind of community that is supportive and learns from one another.  I also love sharing my experiences and passions with my friends.  Especially in my latest and most challenging role yet: a mother.  So I have decided to dive in to the cyber world of today and start this blog.  To share what I’ve learned and am learning in my experiences as a girl working in fashion, as a mother, a wife, and a dreamer.

This life is better than I could have ever designed it.  This life is designed by love.  Here’s to the journey!

You can follow me on Instagram @paigerangel and on Pinterest by clicking here.