Someone Slap Me If I'm Caught Peacocking

A person uses his smartphone to post: “I’m at Such and Such Chinese restaurant right now. Someone help me decide. Should I use chopsticks  or a fork?” He waits for comments and “like” as he waits for his plate of kung-pao chicken to cool off.

Such a scenario was discussed by Luke Burbank and his co-host Andrew Walsh on the podcast TBTL (Too Beautiful to Live). 

A few weeks later on Larry Mantle's AirTalk I heard about this need to show off on social media sites. It’s called “peacocking,” wanting others to think that your life is more exciting than everyone else’s by posting all the “marvelous” things you’re doing on Facebook, twitter, etc.

You meet so many cool people and eat so many fabulous dishes because your life is better than everyone else's. 

 A lot of loneliness and insecurity seems to be brewing here.

I have a blog and my motivation to keep it going is the amount of hits it receives, which is modest, about 1,500 a day with occasional spikes.

It’s disturbing that these hits or people’s Facebook comments and “likes” become the new metric of self-worth, validation, self-esteem, etc.

I've had talks with people who post something on Facebook, no one comments, and they feel abandoned, rejected, irrelevant, embarrassed. 

I fear this metric is rather false one and that it is replacing a much better metric of connection.

On the other hand, we are busy and many of us live far from one another, so the new way of connecting on the Internet has its benefits.

But someone slap me if I start peacocking. 

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Comments

[jonnybardo]

"Peacocking" is part of why I detest Facebook. I have an account but just keep it to stay in "contact" with old friends and rarely post anything except for the occasional semi-humorous status update. I have a couple of "Friends" who obviously peacock and I find it rather annoying and a bit sad, although also understand that it is part of their way of boosting self-esteem and having some sense of community.

But give yourself a break about your blog - you actually use it mainly (I think) to connect with folks of like interests, such as your radio crowd and fellow watch enthusiasts. As I've told you, I don't really have any "watch buddies" so your blog actually serves a purpose for me and others. I suppose you could say the same about Facebook, but for some reason blogging seems a tad more legitimate, at least in my mind. Maybe it is because it is usually around a specific topic of interest; it is "phenomenological" not just voyeuristic or attention-getting.

I've tried blogging a few times over the last decade and a half and never been able to maintain it for more than a few months. Disciple of Chronos is just for a bit of fun and as a way for me to think aloud about all things watches. I'd almost be happy to stick to replying on your blog, but I like to post pictures and do wishlists and other nerdy things, so I started Disciple. It only gets about 100 hits a day, although I've only been doing it for maybe six months. Anyhow, I don't expect or care for it to get much larger. Maybe if it was an actual blog about "serious topics" I'd be more interested in that, but for my purposes small-scale is fine.

Actually, I did start two other blogs at the same time as Disciple about two areas of interest for me that could actually involve greater depth, but I just haven't gotten them goinging: "Zen Agnosia" for all things philosophical and "Imaginal Worlds" for discussion of fantasy and my writing. There are only a few entries on both, but here they are:

http://zenagnosia.wordpress.com/

http://imaginalworlds.wordpress.com/

[Bill]

Your blog is creative writing. I suppose one could say that spreading creative writing by any means, print or electronic, is some kind of a display of vanity. On the other hand, writing without a reader is pointless, so that level of vanity is necessary and excusable.

What I can't understand is the obsession with posting mundane details of life about which no sane person would care. Then some applications try to do that for you automatically. The worst example I have personally is a Freecell solitaire game on my iPhone that wants to integrate with Facebook.

Think about that. This idiotic program wants to announce to the world every time I steal a minute to play a game of solitaire. Odds are it wants to give geographic coordinates of the exciting event too!

[Ed]

It will all be of great interest to historians 500 years from now. Ever read Samuel Pepy's Diary? It was the equivalent of a blog in 1600's England. Now it's required reading in many English Lit courses. Without it we'd never have a first-hand account of The Great Fire of London, and the ravages of the Plague, among other detailed documentation of how people lived and thought 400 years ago.

[Keith Beesley]

Is there really any difference between people who "peacock" on Facebook and people who are showoffs and name-droppers in real life? When someone's status updates annoy me, I just "hide" his or her updates for a while, or "unfriend" them if it gets really bad. Easier to do than ending a real-life friendship.

[herculodge]

Keith, the difference is that Facebook allows more bragging temptation and more bragging opportunity to potentially huge amounts of people, "friends."

[Michael Brent]

I have to relate this story to you
When my son was thirteen years old
I walked in the house one day and he was
madly pounding away on the keyboard
Of our new computer.
I walked up behind him and saw he was
in some kind of chat room and was telling somebody he was a twenty-one year old kung-fu master with a red corvette who lived at the beach in Northern California
( We did in fact live at the beach in Northern California).
I said “ What are you doing Travis?”
He said he’s talking to a 21 year old cheerleader beauty contest winnerand model who lives in New York.
Really I said.
I stood there another minute and said “ How do you know?”
How do I know what dad?
Well your lying aren’t you?
How do you know they are not lying to you?
I will never forget the look on his face.
There are very few times in a parent’s life when
You only have to say something once.
I actually saw the lightbulb light up over his head.
I could see that it never occurred to him that someone might be lying to him..