Tag Archives: Social Media

Pioneering Social Media with DevDisabilities

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Being a Millenial myself (even though I’m a lot different than most of my peers in the same generation), I’ve grown up on mostly graphical (or as I say visual) user interfaces, the Web, Instant Messaging and Social networking or social media.

With my delays in life, I didn’t socialize that much online till my teenage years. I’ve also never went on list-serves because it would advertise my identity. My mother overprotected me and was afraid people would take advantage of me. The teachers were too old to use AIM by a few years. The only social media they knew was Match. Other lessons were basically biased as if the individual was already convicted for being a creep. Positivity with social media or social networking is hard to come by. Not only that but card-carrying women who say computers are boy things, and whining about how complicated they are and not understanding the platform or application doesn’t help matters ether,

Otherwise:

I knew about “relationship statuses” way before it became into the lexicon.

I knew about “MySpace friends” before Facebook Myspaced them and then had “Facebook friends”

I knew the “friends” I’d talk to were never going to be real life friends as early as 2007 and 08.

I knew it.

Over the years, I’ve embraced social media instead. Assuming you don’t use it to be-friend people. If you know risks (and about 95% my cases I know my risks) you should be fine. Pay attention to URLs against “screen names” and like how I got my Avaya PBX, I did a two-step challenge, (“enlighten me” and paid through PayPal until I received it) and just don’t offend people.

I’ve used Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, several other blogs on the autism subject (no longer online) and a few online boards.

What I’ve learned with social media is

  • It is the modern day CB/HAM equivalent
  • You can have some relationship but know it may not be real friends
  • That you can aggregate or send out information in a timely manner
  •  If people really value your work, they’ll contribute by sending replies or emails.
  • And emails in itself can be close, but not too close.
  • It enables transparency, and it enables people to be more open and sharing. The people who think Facebook or Twitter should be a secret diary are ones who are paranoid or corrupt

Basically you would need to know social boundaries, not go too far in conversations. This took many years for me to understand, and severed ties with real world people and the social media/stranger type people too.

The cool things you can do on social media

  • Reach out to C-listed celebs like Max Robbins, the former TV guy on The Howie Carr Show, news talent like Phil Lipof from WCVB (and WABC-TV in NY) who totally embraces his fans and social media. I still get a kick how local TV media will embrace feedback (even if its “inside baseball” type of Tweets)
  • Complain about a company, brand, service, etc and get somewhat of an immediate response (but don’t bitch for the sake of bitching is my rule of thumb)
  • Make movements and be an agent of change
  • If you are news or media junkie, Twitter (or Facebook) is like the poor mans’ wire service.

I do know that I may not have many friends, I’m aware of it and I know I’m a difficult person. I’ve settled with that. But there is so much negativity about it, that some times people need to find the positives in the world of cyber media.

*

I told ‘ya so

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If you thought the ASD/PDD community would get clobbered after the Sandy Hook Massacre, well I told you so on Friday.
The world is  A-Twitter with people not understanding that in almost every case of people with autism, there is a small number of people who may become violent, meanwhile 99% and more people are now being considered as monsters.
Do a Twitter search on just the lone hashtag, and you’ll know what I mean.
The fuel of hatred begins by having one bad experience (whether is first hand to third hand) and the ignorance just blows up from there.
 

Thank God for Facebook

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I really mean that in the title.
I can’t imagine what life was like if you suffered with social retardation and a world before social networking websites, or even the Web, or even those “online services” before those became ISPs ala AOL anyone?
I remember the simpler days in 1992 me being 5 years old living in my own little world. In 1992, Cable TV was at the height of their success, computers were still not in many homes, and the telephone was the primary medium to connect to people in long distances, and since AT&T was forced to break up, it was much easier to make long distance calls.
Again, I can’t imagine being socially retarded and being in his early twenties then. I would think there was more hopes back in 1992 than 2012 because there wasn’t sites like Facebook where you could easily look someone up to find many of the girls/guys one would like then to find your heart broken.
This post was something in the making, it was only a matter of time, and a person of interest to use as an example. This post will describe how using sites like Facebook to find some random person you had the hots for turns out to not be single. I’ve used this as a resource on a number of occasions.
In an earlier story back about a couple weeks ago, I went to a local FedEx/Kinkos/Whatever the name is of the day, and liked the gal that was helping me to do a large document project, that I felt was better done if I outsourced the project to them.
Well as you see in the full screen below, you’ll see the red circle of what I found out.  This is an example of how Social Networking destroys one’s hopes that there is a special someone out there. And of course, shes about 5 years older than I am (from when she finished high school – I redacted all the identifiable info) and it just shows that there are less and less single people near my age bracket. (unless I go younger, which I do not support such thing.)
a screengrab from a Facebook account of a girl that I had liked, and wrote about over a couple weeks ago
Social media just ruins the experience of a “crush” the only ability of a romantic feeling I have.

Disasters and Relationships

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I am attempting to put a current event that might be a big disaster in the coming days to an area that hurricanes happen once in a generation and how friendships and or other relationships correlate. 
I have personally had a crappy year to date in my life (as described in some of my posts.)  I just think part of it has to do of dealing with summer-like weather dating back from late February (the ant indicator as they invaded our kitchen) to now dealing with “stink bugs” invading my house. On top of dealing with summer 24×7 and just trying to get through a day to then start feeling a rumble that felt like an earthquake (that was in reference of an earthquake that occurred last Tuesday evening, the first-ever experience for this writer.)

Then I go back to my day to day life, wearing summer attire in late October, and going through other headaches, to then start to read headlines on Tuesday about Hurricane Sandy approaching the Northeast corridor of the U.S. This comes on the heels after a major fall snowstorm hitting my area a year ago to this day (that really caused gridlock); and the 21st anniversary of a “similar” Halloween storm that was the storyline in the major film The Perfect Storm.*  The weather people can’t predict this storm, and even the computer models are very conflicting! Talk about uncertainty! Never mind my social circle is small to begin with!
*take that film with a grain of salt, never seen the movie, because I heard inaccurate portrayals of the actors, it was dramatized of course!
these last few years have been pretty crazy in the Bad News Department. I’ll do a quick rundown of what happened in my region in the last 6 or so years alone:

  • In May 2006, we had 20″+ of rain falling during the week/end of Mothers Day
  • In late December 2008, we had a massive ice storm that paralyzed communities North of Boston
  • During late February of 2010, we experienced  some record warm temperatures (near 60 on some days) that lead in with a windstorm and a huge coldfront to hit my area on Friday, February 26th. This caused near hurricane grade winds with winter like weather on Saturday and March like weather on Sunday, then another warmfront the days after, with damages that caused widespread outages for power and telecommunications services for many areas for about a week!
  • Then, Hurricane Irene hitting the Northeast part of the US, including Washington, D.C., New York, Boston – while the real brunt of the storm effected the Carolinas, and Upstate New York and Interior parts of New England (something the mass media failed to cover.) This happened a few days after a large scale earthquake rocking the East Coast on August 23rd of last year.

As I am dealing with trying to prepare with ether flooding, or huge wind damage, I have a very small social circle. In the bullet point on the 2010 windstorm, I had “friends” in Middlesex and Essex Counties in Massachusetts that got unscathed. Unfortunately I was dealing with that cliche “bad things happen to good people” while the people that don’t get punished for being bad people. The ones in interest both live in cities where they never go offline, one of those cities was blacked out outside of the downtown area and this individual never knew what was happening until this individual went and looked out of their window.
Now granted these people don’t have TVs, they don’t have landline phones and are totally Internet Connected. (and because of their stupidity, things like the Emergency Alert System is getting pushed to cell and smartphones by new FCC rules) And that same stupidity of these people, are like I have described before; self-absorbed and if they did look out for me, it was half-assed anyways.
Then the social media aspect makes me just sick. The Weather Channel has not only dumbed down their website to the point they are attracting the socialites. It drives me nuts when I see the red banner on top of their website to click and “warn your friends”. Then I see the cable channel having graphics like “#sandy” to tweet the storm.
Sure I have family members  that we will be looking out each other during the storm, sure I’ll be hanging out with my mother as this storm approaches. But its the secondary relationships that really bothers me. I have had questionable “friends”, and I would logically assume that friends would reach out during times of trouble, whether they are personal or meteorological.
This storm is coming at the worst timing as I am trying to get a break from this stressful year. Now this storm may just cause even more and more stress, and I can’t wait till the end of the storm for the post-mayhem goes away, as we go into the holiday season of Thanksgiving, Black Friday, Christmas and then New Years.

How “Friends” Selfishly Communicate in the 2010s. (V.2)

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My grandmothers birthday was recently. She lives in another community as we are preparing for her to move to our house by the end of the year. She is the last member of my small family to move into our new home that we have been living for the last couple of years.

We were going to plan to celebrate over the weekend, but it got postponed. I remembered her birthday on that specific day, and I sent an actual birthday card, and obviously it arrived a few days later. I need to call her and check up on the status.

My grandmother is as analog as you get (she lives in such old social standards, like sending a card that is HANDWRITTEN of a thank you via post mail. She doesn’t like the ideal of Facebook (because she’s an extremely private and quiet individual, therefore she doesn’t like how people would post their entire lives on the internet. In some ways I don’t like that because my general ideal of excessive privacy leads to troubled and corrupted lifestyles – i.e. my own personal views of local government lead me to be somewhat opposite to her views.)

She never used a computer outside of work (only using a specific mission critical app in the last decade), and she again, as an old lady prefers phone calls and letters. Because she’s a “farmers girl”, she views the world as “little” and revolves what my former town being “small town” like 5,000 people small which wasn’t the same in over a half a century ago.

Well I am someone who tends to not focus on the past (thats the family curse of afraid of change) but I try to live in a semi reasonable, but progressive society. At some point people need to adapt and stop reliving like my town is still a small town where everyone knows everybody, etc.

Now that ends to a point, and when my nostalgia comes into play.

I often don’t celebrate my birthday (and its becoming just “another day” beginning this year) because it was generally forgotten. People would not remember, often they need some aid to help them, like using Facebook – that’s if someone publicly publishes their birthdate/day online. The “friends” I used to have were really not friends. These people never seemed to look beyond your default picture or album. I had my birthdate as my handle on my MySpace, YouTube and Twitter accounts, but no one seemed to ever visit them, or even question what 3 digit number meant, especially when I used to put strong synergy across all my profiles.
They never reciprocated, and never went the extra mile (because that was dirty work for these entitled jerks.) Now granted, I did send emails, and not cards via mail. But an email is now the social standard to the old fashioned “letter” but digital and in fact is more personable than opposed to text. If you use Microsoft’s Outlook like I do, email gets stored into a computer file and can be read on any modern email client, etc.

Text messaging, however is the lowest standard for communication. Why? Its because the text messages can easily be deleted, and one touch of a button and the message disappears for good. This isn’t good if you want to keep a breakup letter for eternity as opposed to a letter or an email. Its much easier to send a half-assed thoughtful message via SMS as opposed to taking 5 minutes out of your busy life to type up and send an email birthday wish, etc. (For the record, I was never a fan of online greeting cards.)

Now back to Facebook, often if a birthday occurs, it gets published on the frontpage, then one starts the wish, then it extends to everyone else when people start to notice that trend on their News Feed. I did a test in 2010, made my birthday private, then made it public later that day. Guess what happened? These alleged “friends” wished my a happy birthday after. How fucked up is that? These same people who didn’t care that I turned 21 ether, never offered to have a drink together or what, as these people were social alcoholics to begin with.

Facebook, and all these other iDemented devices are really dumbing down the “normal” population and the groups who were forced and mentally raped of social standards, and socialization protocols, and other CAN’T dos, are actually going to be the best and the brightest because we socialize like robots by doing protocols and ettiques, while the “normal” population have an open license to be a jerk.

I try to be the good guy, and yet I get punished.

The Roadmap for this Blog

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So to refresh some people, I created an organizational chart of how this blog came to be to what is now to what the future is.
This purpose of this blog was to focus on deeper issues about relationships from the eyes of someone with autism. This blog had to be spunoff from my other blog to to that. My other blog has been very popular for people searching for answers like

These results often come on my search metrics every day. And any of those pages that get indexed doesn’t have answers. They are called “Unanswered Questions.”
So this publisher want’s to get really deep on various issues that would needed to be spunoff from the mothership blog. Here is the organizational roadmap of what this blog came to be, and what its future might be.
an image of the roadmap of the two blogs
Originally there was not an end target. The blog was going to just stories of observations of my life of how I saw love, friends, acquaintances, various degrees of relationships and then some.
As this past month went by, I started to loose patience. I am 25 years old, and fell off a cliff right on my 21st birthday. It will also be 5 years since I had a last job! I’ve also realized that my current programs doesn’t have what I need because its not in development yet, but at the same time the current social skills lessons are okie dokie with no issues. I have barely gotten into any romantic relationships, and I will admit I have sorta kissed some girls more than I have ever been kissed by someone outside my family! Never mind I can’t remember the last time I held hands, the last time I hugged a girl/lady, and I have never been able to get into any relationships where I could go all touchy, and into a sexual relationship of some sorts. I don’t want to sound harsh, but you know there aren’t that many single 25+ as time goes by, and you know a girl peaks in her sexual attraction about this time.  Never mind , the social norms of not wearing mini skirts, short shorts and other things after a certain age too.  My own hormones are starting to loose its youth too!
With that said, a new feature called a Countdown appeared after realizing the last 2 years of what my realistic future will become. Read The Tell All, and  it explains what I went through. Realizing that I really don’t have much of a future, by the beginning of next year, I am abstaining from any socialization, after 5 years of making it a priority.  This component will merge into The Forgotten Autistic as other issues will merge to the 12-31-12 deadline of giving up hope for any futures other than to work ones ass off.
So that’s how this blog became and will become.

Faux “Friends”

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I have mentioned earlier about how some of my “friends” made a massive fail in the last couple of years. I realized that some of the handful of friends preferred the “cyber” relationship, using ether the social networking sites or using the instant messaging client. One incident was nearly 2 years ago, before I moved to my new town, and one of my pals had asked me about some event that was going to happen about the time I had seen this individual. She asked me “did you get the invite?” referring to a Facebook invite request. I had told her that I had purged my Facebook account (and no, not “deactivate” as some think thats how you close a Facebook account down) and I was just tired of using it.
Now an alleged “true friend” would follow up (especially if you are theoretically close to that individual) ether by looking me up (you know you have to use the search function when you have 600 “friends”) or go the old fashioned way of oh I dunno, EMAIL or dare I say my 10-digit cell number?
This individual is hack, she cheated her way through being a high school teacher thanks to loopholes of the law, and being a union employee and using her “dyslexia” as her “disability” you get fruitcakes like her not screwing students with their ignorance, you get fruitcakes being a lazy-ass not trying to go a little beyond her abilities to follow up on this invite to her “friend”.
I just can’t stand people who can’t even remember one’s birthday. I think it bothers me because my birthday had been forgotten and I never got full attention outside of my family. That same year, I hid my birthday to private, leading to that day. I put it to private that evening, and I got electronic wishes from my alleged “friends.”
I don’t use Facebook because I don’t have “real” friends, and I feel using Facebook for just catching up with “acquaintances” is just useless. And would you think using Facebook just to post pictures of you behind the camera and posting things that are probably useless only to you would seem to be odd or just waste of ones time?
Politically, Facebook drives me nuts, they are taking the stuff you post and using it against you to the advertisers without your knowledge. I am not going to discuss whether or not posting pictures of one being wasted is or is not appropriate, its their own issue, not mine or yours for that manner. My issue is I can’t stand a company getting away of doing bad things and a “free market” being abused. Granted, I feel that I have to use it to reach a broader audience maintaining the Facebook pages for my two blogs.

“Can I be your [Facebook] friend?”

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Well that depends on you level of the relations with that person.
At a really young age of about 18, I saw the smoke through the mirrors. That was back when MySpace was ruling the world while Friendster was on life support and Facebook was still known to the privileged elite. I knew that a “friend” on a social networking website was kinda like a Rolodex card or a “contact” according to LinkedIn.
I was setting my self up for realistic expectations. My MySpace had up to 20 “friends” partially because many went over to Facebook and by the height of my original Facebook account, I had up to 40 “friends” or “contacts”. Some didn’t friend me for reasons I have no idea, because my other friends were “friends” of various people. Even old elementary school teachers were too chicken. This was after I was 21. Wasn’t a student. Was it because I was too nasty in the past via the internet communication?
I knew when I “friended” some of my old classmates from my old town, I knew that I wouldn’t ever meet them in person again. Because I stopped seeing them once I left out of district, and you know how perceptions change as people progress and evolve.
However, the normal (or “nerotypical”) groups are the really socially demented ones. They brag about their friend count (some in the low to mid thousands!) and they are the actual “fake” ones with a “real” or “full name”. Their default pictures often  glamorize their shallow life. So I ask why is it ok for them  to be “fake” and demented while people like me who have socially awkward problems are the ones that shouldn’t be shunned? People tell me that they believe that I am a real person so why are these “fake” people getting enabled to be a plastic drama queen?
Never mind rich families (don’t matter if you are a republican Wingnut or a democratic Moonbat – because both are arrogant) that have enabled their children to give negative stereotypes of people of developmental disorders or disabilities. So if you try to friend a girl (sorry for the sexism) on Facebook, if they see your profile they may just get scared of you because they are afraid of unknown.
I’ve been burned of what I thought were my real-life “friends” that I tried to retain on Facebook as well (what’s wrong having an offline/online balance? there shouldn’t be) though in fact they treated me as a virtual person and had severely betrayed me. I had to cut these allegedly “important” people out of my life and the last year and a half after was the most painful social (in)experiences in recent memory before that leaving my local middle school and suddenly loosing contact of what were elementary “friends” a year before.
So between relationship levels, “social pyramids”, statuses, and privileged statuses, Facebook has not been successful in the last couple of years. Because I am not good for those “friends”. Simply I am a pile of dirt until I have to prove the higher social levels that I am good enough to be in their social clique.
That might had been a vague paragraph, but this is how the ellitests on autism teach (or preach) upon these individuals like moi. We have to THINK. THINK about how I am related to this friend, THINK what social level I am with, ARE these people ok to go out outside the packet-based world? ARE these people close enough to talk about various issues, should I THINK in case I screw up, if I might get pressed charges for being a creep?
These are the many “social” baggages I carry every day thanks to a small group of people making me feel useless. Or maybe I didn’t listen because I have esteem issues. I don’t know now. All I know is I am “socially” confused. This is why this blog exists.

The best way to socially network…

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is to click on log out
 
This screengrab of the logout link on Facebook was taken a few years ago (I thought I had one with the cursor pointing to it) after noticing my alleged “friends” really wasn’t paying attention to me but their other “friends”. They could’ve cared less about my stuff I put up and engaging more but I ether wasn’t good enough or I might not have the best packet-based presence as opposed to the offline presence.