Ah, June… Summer is at our doorstep, the days are (almost all of them) seeming to get a little bit longer, and for the second year in a row I am partaking in my daily blogging exercise, marginally focused along a theme I’ve simply called Those 30 posts in June. No planning. No writing stuff days ahead. Just this: each day a meanderingly vague prompt drives a meanderingly vague post… and today that post just happens to be:
June 20th // Something You Are Feeling
I’ll tell you a secret… I’m an introvert. No, really. As negative a connotation as that has in our modern society — what with type-A, fast-talking, energetic-party-people being the gold standard by which most are judged in western culture — I’m not completely afraid of admitting that. Most anyone who knows me — personally, I mean — knows this fact. It probably wouldn’t surprise too many others.
But I’ve been lingering in the public sphere more and more these days.
I’ve been tweeting, plus-one…ing, and generally posting a crap-load of content to various blogs, galleries, and content collections. I’ve been feeling very social lately.
And this collides in a epic explosion of sparks and data with my — ahem — introverted personality. I’m just not used to being public.
And it seems that sphere is growing. I mean, not only are new and interesting (and moderately influential) people connecting with me in these broad social networks every day, following me on Twitter or Circling me in Google Plus, but I wandered over to Klout the other day — you know, just to see — and discovered that my klout score was in the high forties. No, really. Screenshot attached. And for whatever that is worth, I suppose.
And of course all that circling and tweeting and klouting means that more people are reading the junk I write and more people are looking at the photos I take and more people are offering feedback and insight into ideas I hang out there in the digital spaces of the world.
Being social, frankly, is not in my nature. Being social is this effort that I need to push through to participate in a way that my rational mind tells me is fair reciprocation for those who are putting that effort back in my direction.
And it’s exhausting. No, really. I go out for ten kilometer runs to take a break from social media… THAT’S how exhausting.
I’ve moved up a step in the social universe of the internet, it would seem. Not much… just a nudge, a step, an incremental bit higher. Barely worth mentioning. I don’t know when or why, actually. But… well, I’ve suddenly and unexpectedly become someone people follow and circle and more people are doing those trivial-yet-deliberate actions each day. And it is weird for me, this feeling so… social.