I’ve never had a Facebook account or any other social media. I know they keep shadow profiles, but I’ve never given permission. I never had any interest and frankly still don’t.
The problem I’m having is that I don’t exist online when people try to look me up. When someone tries to check me out, there’s nothing there and apparently that’s considered abnormal these days. I think it’s starting to affect my life negatively for various reasons I’d rather not get into.
I’d just like some advice about where to start if you wanted to dip your toes in and check it out. LinkedIn, maybe?
I don’t think the definition needs to be stretched very far. In any of such cases, the function is social, it is about connecting people and enabling them to communicate in a wider, multilateral fashion, online. However asocial we might convince ourselves of being, if we truly had no interest in it, we wouldn’t even be discussing anything here.
Even lurkers, at the very least, place trust on a group to bring them matters which they are interested in, and if you consider it, this is the manner in which Reddit and forums are most similar to following influencers. The only difference is that it is a crowd-driven highlight, rather than an individual one, and even then people don’t tend to follow just one single influencer.