Using social media – are you a Joy or a Darnell?

Over the last year or so, Kev and I have migrated from watching films on DVD to buying box sets of TV series and watching all the things we should have watched but had a life at the time..

: Cover of My Name Is Earl – The Album

I’ll admit to loving Frasier, it works on so many levels and don’t you just want to take Niles home and smother, I mean mother him? Another of my personal faves is ‘My name is Earl‘.

I was pretty gutted to see a campaign on twitter earlier this year to prevent the 4th series being the last series of Earl and I even blogged and tweeted a few times about it myself. Alas, the social media campaign that saved ‘Chuck’ failed to save Earl and that is a real shame.

Watching season 4 I just watched the episode where Darnell joins Joy to ‘Buddybook’ where she can make friends, but no one in Camden county wants to ‘friend’ her as she is mean to them. She becomes quite frustrated and angry about the fact she has no online friends and resorts to asking the kids at Space Academy if they are on buddybook…

Does that work in real life? Do you not ‘friend’ people on Facebook and other sites? Or do you ‘friend’ everyone? Do you worry about ‘friending’ troublemakers – what might people think if they looked down who you were following on twitter or who your friends were on Facebook?

Darnell is everyone’s friend, with over 300 friends online and everyone knows him offline too. Is he just more sociable?

One social networking website has been known to ban people from using it if you are part whom it deems to be the ‘wrong’ crowd. They would probably ban Joy.

Is this what social networking is about? Networking is about engaging and building relations and you can’t do that based on another persons perception of someone else. Or can you?

What advice would you give someone in Joy’s situation? Do you check who someone else follows? Does it make a difference to your relationship with them?

Sarah