I currently have nine social media platforms on my phone, the oldest of which is Facebook, which I joined in December 2008. I didn’t have any desire at the time to be on Facebook, but our daughter was three, and we were concerned about photos of her being shared without our knowledge. So I created a Facebook profile to keep an eye on things.

It didn’t take long for me to get hooked. I started looking for people I knew…and playing Farmville. There was a lot of Farmville. For the first year, almost all of my posts were Farmville-related. Even my first profile picture was my Farmville character. Over time, I stopped playing Farmville, but I spent a lot of time scrolling through my News Feed. In the last few years, I have taken a handful of breaks from Facebook but have recently found a nice balance of blog posts, birthday wishes, random stories, and things to share and celebrate. I even set up my first Facebook fundraiser for American Cancer Society in memory of my husband as well as my first Facebook event for his celebration of life on his birthday in July.

I have profiles on Instagram and Twitter, which have been all or mostly blog posts in the past year. I have Yammer and Workplace, which are really just used internally for work. LinkedIn I joined once, then dropped, then rejoined back in 2010. I joined Snapchat when my daughter joined because I think it’s important for parents to know what their kids are viewing and sharing. And then there’s the latest—TikTok—which I also downloaded because my daughter was on it.

When I first started scrolling my “For You Page” (for those of you who aren’t on TikTok, think the News Feed on Facebook), most of the minute-long videos were dance trends. These were literally all videos of people doing the same dance moves to the same song as everyone else. I can’t count the number of times my daughter has told me that she knows just a short section of a song because she heard it on TikTok. I honestly didn’t see the appeal.

But TikTok caters to a short attention span, and the trends change ridiculously fast. There are a handful of content creators with enough followers to be allowed to record three-minute videos, but most are restricted to a minute or less. That makes it really easy to lose yourself for an hour just scrolling through videos. I prefer the funny ones, the dog and cat videos, the cute toddler videos. I’ve even recorded about a dozen of my own videos of our dog being adorable. (And now my daughter has confirmed that she thinks I’m even more weird. 🤦‍♀️)

There’s a woman (mamasleet) who tosses random things at her husband as he walks in the front door or around a corner, and he catches almost everything. There’s a doctor in New York (dr.eric.b) who spends a lot of time talking about COVID among other things. There’s a woman in Canada (kallmekris) who started her videos as what she imagines it’s like to have a toddler and now has at least a dozen characters. She has 29.2M followers, and TikTok is her full-time job. There are a lot of teachers, but my favorite is the_mr_steiner1, who shares random musings from teacher life. I started following him when he was posting videos of ridiculous things parents say to teachers (“tuck my kid’s shirt into his pants when he arrives” 😲).

Like any other social media platform, your feed changes as you watch, like, or comment on videos. For a while, every other video I saw related to Grey’s Anatomy. When I stopped watching them all the way through, I started to see fewer. Themes that you follow generate similar creators in your feed. I tend to “like” a lot of the references to the ’80s and the Midwest, so I see a lot more of those. I recently came across Edwin McCain’s account (theedwinmccain), and some “youngster” had commented on one of his videos “Not being rude, but who are you?” As he tried to explain in a minute or less, eventually he just said, “Your mom would know.” 🤣

One of the recent trends I’ve noticed is people trying to catch a significant other cheating or checking to see if a friend or family member will cover for their partner. In the latter situation, one partner says to the other, “I don’t trust (whomever),” and then calls to ask if the partner is with “whomever.” Inevitably, the person on the phone covers for the partner in question. It’s hard to know whether a lot of the videos are real or staged, but it begs the question of how far is too far in trying to catch someone cheating.

A while back, I read a book by J.P. Delaney (a pseudonym of Anthony Capella) that was built on this premise. It’s an older title but worth the read.

Book Review

⭐⭐⭐⭐
4 Stars for Believe Me by J.P. Delaney

352 pages
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Publication Date: July 24, 2018
I received an advance copy of this title from NetGalley and Ballantine Books in exchange for an honest review.

Publisher’s Description

Claire Wright is desperate. A British drama student in New York without a green card, she takes the only job she can get: working for a firm of divorce lawyers, posing as an easy pickup in hotel bars to entrap straying husbands. But then the game changes. 
 
When one of her targets becomes the suspect in a murder investigation, the police ask Claire to use her acting chops to lure him into a confession. From the start, she questions the part she’s being asked to play: Is Patrick Fogler a killer? Or is there more to this setup than she’s being told?
 
Claire will soon realize she is playing the deadliest role of her life. 

************

J.P. Delaney’s Believe Me had me endlessly second-guessing who was the criminal. Claire is a young British actress who moves to New York to escape a scandal and finds herself unable to work legally. She takes cash jobs with a law firm trapping cheating spouses until one of the clients ends up murdered. Patrick is the husband of a client who didn’t fall for Claire’s trap but is now suspected of killing his wife. The police enlist Claire’s help by hiring her to form a relationship with Patrick in an effort to get him to implicate himself.

Claire’s character is one that really makes the reader question the truth. Throughout the story, I suspected both Patrick and Claire more than once, along with a few other characters. And the author is really good at feeding into the idea of Claire’s paranoia and need for approval. Some of the formatting was distracting after a while.

The author set up some chapters like scenes in a play. At first, I liked it since the story is supposed to be from Claire’s point of view and she prides herself on her ability to immerse herself in a role, but it was inconsistent and became a distraction after a while. Also, the story was not ALWAYS from Claire’s perspective. “Turning my back to the camera, I walk away. Downstairs, Frank exhaled slowly.” If it’s really Claire’s POV, she would not be able to comment on what Frank did downstairs.

I won’t give away the ending, but I gave 4 stars instead of 5 because I found it a little bit implausible. All in all, though, I recommend picking this up. 

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