Re: the title, sounds a little pretentious I know quoting Shakespeare but I truly do love all those plays I studied in English class and look for any opportunity to show off my knowledge of them and thought it fitting here. Thank God for those Coles notes.

So as for my love hate relationship with social media, I know I have to embrace it to get my blog out there and stuff and there are aspects of it that are useful such as when I need to contact an old friend and can’t for the life of me keep track of what their latest email address is, in which case I send them a private message, not a public timeline/wall blast for God’s sake. But for the following other purposes I mean seriously what is wrong with us as a society? Have we all become narcissistic braggarts in the last ten years? None of us would have dreamed of doing stuff like this before then. And I include “we” in there because I’m guilty of this ridiculousness too. So don’t get all mad at me for making fun of this, it’s just supposed to make you laugh at yourself.

1. Overly exuberant use of hashtags. I mean can someone explain to me the purpose of posting some random family pic of you and your little dog Scotty and then hashtagging things like “true love forever” and “family love” and “blessed”. Like what exactly are you trying to achieve? So you want your pic to show up in case someone searches for this stuff? But why would someone search for these phrases? Don’t they already know what they mean? Or you want to convey your emotions in short corny phrases you wouldn’t use in a real life conversation unless you were a total cheeseball? Why would you do that? What happened to letting the pic speak for itself. Don’t get me wrong, I do like seeing the pic of cute Scotty but please spare me the cheesy phrases so I don’t need to vomit after.

2. Happy holidays (Xmas, Diwali, Eid, Hanukkah, insert whatever other religious festivity you’d like here) from my family to yours!!!” First of all like who are you anyway? The freaking CBS early show? What’s with the “from my family to yours”? I think it’s pretty clear that the message is coming from your end, not some random person for whom you are conveying a message for. I get it. It’s from you. A simple “Happy holidays” would suffice. Also I don’t know how to explain it but something sounds a bit conceited about the “from my family to yours” part. Again you are just a regular family like mine, not the Macy’s conglomerate as a whole, not the Kennedys or the Obamas or the Trumps or as I said the CBS early show or the Today show for that matter.

3. Dorky pictures of yourself and husband and a set of long stem roses and overly smug smiles on your wedding anniversary along with weirdly personal proclamations of love that you have now blasted to your 1,000 combined friend count. I feel like I’m watching a really lame Zales or Jared’s commercial to the tune of “Tonight I celebrate my love for you🎶”. What happened to private expressions of love? Keep it to yourself, there are some lonely people on your FB who you are making feel worse!

4. Of course the most obvious one – the selfie/glamor shot. If you were a child of the 90s you might remember these colorful portraits that were offered in suburban malls where you would pose in hideous stage mom pageant clothes, jewelry, and makeup in weird positions like your chin resting on your hand. Not like a cute family portrait but a portrait of just yourself. I remember most people used to giggle at stuff like this when they walked by. But now no one is giggling because it’s now the norm!!! And on top of it it keeps proliferating because as you post these ridiculous glamor shots of yourself, your friends keep writing things like “absolutely stunning, gorgeous, beautiful, supermodel”. I’m as vain as the next person but seriously? We all know you are posting these in order to elicit these exaggerated, borderline insincere expressions of adulation.

Needless to say social media is not like Halloween where you get to pretend to be someone else and no one recognizes you thereby allowing you to get away with obnoxious behavior. We all know who you are and what you’re doing so do us a favor and make it stop!