Sitting at the Social Media “Cool Kids” Table

Have you ever seen any of those stereotypical PG13 movies about high school? The ones that feel compelled to include an over-the-top segregation of the school scene in the cafeteria. Think Mean Girls, She’s All That, Clueless, 10 Things I Hate About You…the list goes on, and every one is kind of reminiscent of The Breakfast Club, with an ever expanding and modernized list of cliques.

The more I think about social media, and the things I often simultaneously both love and hate, the more I think this space is much more high school than any of us would like to admit. Here’s why, and a guide to navigating various social (media) landmines.

The cool kids all eat together.

In this case, it’s breakfast and not lunch, but while the timing of the meal and the table’s venue may have changed, the purpose is still for the popular people to get together and congratulate each other on being awesome.

We love gossip.

Gone are the days of note passing and secret bathroom meetings; Facebook, Twitter, email and IM have made it possible to spread both celebrity news and “real people” dirt quickly and efficiently. Reply to all or send a Tweet out into the world to tell us all the juicy details, or show a little tact with a DM or private Facebook message. Either way, word gets around–fast.

Plenty of passive-aggressive backstabbing.

You know the Tweets that start with something like “I’m a big fan but…” or “I usually like your work…” and end with something about “just my opinion” and leave you wondering if you just got very publicly dissed? Chances are you did, but not in the pantsed-in-front-of-the-auditorium way; this is a much more subtle affront that high school girls perfect very early on.

It’s allways about the happening party.

Beta invites are social currency, and TweetUps require more preparation than Prom. But instead of congregating around a keg at the football stud’s party, we’re scrambling to be the first to try out a new site or prove how social we are in real life by putting a body with our artsy MySpace-angle profile picture.

We can’t stop talking about ourselves.

Ever notice how teenagers do this? It’s a skill. And one we, apparently, have not grown out of. Sites like Twitter encourage this self-indulgent pontification, but we have created an art form out of it…and called it marketing. Scores of webpages are devoted to sharing our personal thoughts, likes and dislikes. Could we be more like a teen girl and a mirror?

Everyone’s on (insert site of the week here) sound a lot like “but Mom, everyone is going!”

I could go on and on, because the more I think about it, we really perpetuate the “coolness” of social media because we love to hear ourselves talk (and isn’t that what I’m doing here?). Yes, it can be useful to brands, yada yada yada, but a lot of our love for the internet and social media in particular is that it allows us, the ones who weren’t cool in high school, to finally have our moment in the sun. It’s Revenge of the Nerds, for real. The geeks inheriting the Earth. Because I guarantee you, the coolest, most followed people on Twitter (excluding the Hollywood Twitter wannabes) were not hanging out with the jocks and cheerleaders back in the day.

We are our own little clique, and while it can be a bit incestuous at times, that’s part of why we love it. I was definitely a dork in high school, but online, we don’t need to get caught up in the bullshit that plagued those formative and traumatizing years. And thanks to the magic of Facebook, we can laugh at the people we used to know and see how far we’ve come.