Tasha Dhanraj peruses pictures of Pinterest

As someone who, up to a week ago, was a social media professional, I’ve grown very used to paying close attention to the new networks and sites that pop up every now and again. Since Facebook and Myspace, social media websites are infesting our lives and multiplying like termites in a Wendy house. For the sake of keeping on top with the developments in the cyberworld, I always have to sign up to the new ones, no matter how obscure.

“Pinterest was the most exciting thing since ‘Angry Birds’”

The latest one I signed up to was Pinterest. It’s where you go all around the internet and find pretty pictures of pin cushions and country lanes and then random people from America, Scandinavia and Australia share the pictures with their followers. For the first 24 hours after I opened my account, I was obsessed. It was the most exciting thing I’d come across since ‘Angry Birds’. Then I woke up the day after to find a series of emails from the website telling me that this person had liked a picture I uploaded and another person was now following me. I didn’t really care. I spent another couple of days looking through pictures of cooking utensils strangers wanted to buy. I now haven’t looked at it for a week.

When it comes down to it, these new social media sites are all well and good, but really they are just ways that we can avoid using Facebook, so we feel we are being productive, but in reality we are still posting pointless things to the internet that are of literally no value to anyone.

But still, we all join these things, get bored and then spend the next six months getting more and more frustrated by the constant trickle of emails from the site to let you know that someone somewhere still uses it and they have liked that picture you uploaded of your cat. Eventually, the website heralded to replace Facebook is suddenly swept under the carpet of every media magazine and never spoken of again.

Be strong you social media butterflies! Don’t listen to the tech news section of that reputable newspaper. Click reject to the invitations from people you worked with six years ago to join a new website. Stop lying to yourself that you want to deactivate your Facebook account and find something new with better privacy policies. You don’t want to! You love and need it! Save time, save your personal details and stick with looking at pictures of your ex on Facebook.