Topic Tuesday//Designing your online world//Tues. 16 Jan. 7pm - 9pm AEDT

[Former-Member]

Using different networks differently is clever, @Lonely_Together! I don't use FB much, but I'm on Twitter a lot. And Twitter is such a big sea of stuff -- actually, it leads to the next talking point:

Controlling what you see online

Texts, emails, notifications, tweets, posts: it’s easy to get flooded with information, and that makes me anxious and depressed. I sometimes turn off notifications for email or social media for a while. I also mute terms on Twitter (like names of people or issues I don’t want to hear about).

How do you manage what you do and don’t see, to prevent it becoming overwhelming or upsetting?

[Former-Member]

Welcome @Mazarita and @Former-Member (I didn't get to wave a hello to you earlier!) thanks for joining us 

[Former-Member]

Hi @Mazarita, thanks for coming! One thing I hear people say a lot is that they want to be 'totally themselves' online. I don't really agree -- I think it's fine and wise to be selective about which parts of yourself you share, and with whom.

[Former-Member]

Actually, 'don't agree' is probably a bit harsh. I just think it's fine to pick and choose what you share.

[Mazarita]

@Former-Member, @Lonely_Together, I've been on Twitter since 2009 and, mostly for networking in the creative field, I have followed a lot of people and have quite a lot of followers. My main way of controlling the flood of tweets in my news stream is to use lists. I only put the people I really want to read in my lists and I have a number of them for different areas of interest. This works well for me. Again, though, I don't share anything personal there, just the artistic stuff.

[Former-Member]

This is an area that i do struggle with and even here because there is always so much going on and i cant keep up with it all or need to not keep up with it for different reasons. I do find it hard to 'swtich off' from the news and things like that and i have a lot of notifications on my phone for the news which i probably should turn off and be stricter with.

[Lonely_Together]

@Mazarita  I lived a "double life" in real life for many, many years & found it really exhausting.  It has been quite liberating (although definitely not always easy!) to embrace who I am and be able to share that.  But it is so much more public online and things can exist potentially forever and you can find yourself engaging with complete strangers who you know nothing about - which means even if I'm okay with sharing/disclosing mental health details, it's still a big decision about how much to share, when and with whom! Sometimes I wish it wasn't all so exhausting...

[Former-Member]

@Mazarita YES! I loooove Twitter lists. I have a few. Like you, I do some professional stuff on social media, so I keep those followers in one list, and newsy stuff in another, and close friends in a third. I use the friend list like my home base -- if I've only got a few minutes, I pop into that list and I get all the joy of my friends without the big firehose of stuff that my full timeline has in it! @Lonely_Together

[Mazarita]

@Lonely_Together, with people who are close to me, I share my mental health struggles, though not even all friends really. It's a tricky balance. The 'double life' online I think works well on the other hand.

Hi @Former-Member, thanks for the hello. 

[Former-Member]

@Former-MemberI turned off my notifications to FB not that I get too many.

I only receive emails from SANE but then the email address I use here is only for here and I don't check it alot. I find that this helps control what I see. Control is such a big thing for me so I need to make sure I can control things around me to feel safer and that includes on line.