Attention-seekers find comfort in exposing too much of themselves online

While perusing though the tantalizing tangles of the tangible Interwebs, there’s those Web sites at which my friends and I constantly arrive. Many of you know them as social networking Web sites. Of course, I speak of Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and, my personal favorite, YouTube, among others.

If you’ve been hiding behind those books for too long, you may not know that Facebook is a virtual and interactive yearbook, or at least the creators hoped for that in its inception in the mid-00’s; Twitter allows you to connect with others in 140-character blurbs about your life; bloggers (OK, I) hail Tumblr as the LiveJournal and Blogger of the late 00’s and my love, YouTube, allows users to upload video content for worldwide sharing.

However, professionals, mature young’uns and adult adults use these outlets in far different ways than do younger adults, the self-loving (what Features Editor Beca Grimm would call “masturbatory,” for those of you more familiar with her pieces) individuals and the perverts.

Turning innocent social media into an instant whore-out fest, the second group takes over Facebook with his pictures of that nonalcoholic six-pack and her photos of the tongue-hanging-out-while-wearing-ripped-jeans-and-clutching-the-ever-coveted-plastic-red-cup.

Basically, they pride themselves in thinking that the whole world wants to know every detail about their lives at every moment of any day.

Variations of this variety fill up the News Feeds of anyone from ex-best friends from second grade to significant others from 6th grade who share a mutual friend.

Sure, I realize that not everyone always cares about the latest happy haps in any of our lives, but you overstep the boundaries of over-sharing as you type away your fifth status update of the day.

Facebook users have well surpassed the allotted limit of sharing. Sure, I care about how you thought about that latest flick, but do I really care exactly what time you’re waking up tomorrow to beat that Starbucks crowd before your class in the morning?

Not at all.

I thought Facebook was a fun way to keep up with friends from high school and middle school, but not a way to say how great you make your social life or how well those sit-ups post-protein shake have worked.

So, members of my second, self-absorbed group take to the Twitterverse, littering up feeds with too many details and too much pseudo-emotions that should have been left behind with our black-and-white, skull bone-infused Xanga pages.

Instead, users utilize Twitter for arguments over who should take Proactive and yelling at Nickelodeon stars for unfollowing certain Netlebrities.

My favorite tweets are about random life musings, like screenwriter Diablo Cody who once tweeted about a bb bullet hitting her window and how her stalker must be 5 years old.

Instead, the popular ones come from someone complaining about something, hence where Trending Topics such as “#convoover” and “#whenwasitcoolto” arise.

I’ve seen Twitter pages of a person contributing to the same Trending Topic meme so many times throughout the day – solely to complain.

Complaining on Twitter is a lot better than strippin’ down on DailyBooth — a rising social network outlet where a user takes a photo of himself or herself every day for a whole year.

Over the summer, DailyBooth saw the rise of Naked Friday, in which users compete against one another to see who could be the most risky and still not receive those public indecency charges.

While it’s easy to dodge pictures like this – simply don’t follow anyone you see hiding their privates with a clever bowl of fruit or photoshopped swan – it’s the fact that things like this exist, allowing views about the Internet from people like Brother Micah to easily twist into that instant sex simulation against which he preaches, that make the World Wide Web receive its negative connotation.

It simply makes all of us Internet-lovin’ regular folk look bad for spending serious amounts of time on the thing.

We’re not the ones who, on Omegle.com, instantly disconnect from the chat once you admit to being a male — symbolically telling you that they wanted to talk to girl who will bare all on MSN.

It makes the whole, College Humor-popularized mantra of “b00bs or GTHO!” seem like it applies to multi-use online fiends, but really, it’s only to that huge majority of sad, sad people, who want to use the Internet for the vanity they’re missing in real life.

But who am I say, “stop the vanity forever”?

I guess it’s just as ignorant as saying that since you’ve never tried that particular kind of hot sauce that you can’t really be the hot sauce connoisseur that you tell all of your friends and neighbors.

So, since I personally don’t take part in Internet vanity, I can’t deny that it must be this fun debaucher for those involved.

It’d be too strong to say that these people develop into our next pedophiles and porn stars, because I realize that if someone actually told them that what they’re doing is immature or simply disturbing, they would consider stopping.

So while the attention-seekers continue to vain their veins, the rest of us Web wanderers mold into that self-strokin’ brute stereotype.