Yesterday at 3 p.m., my colleague looked up from his iPhone. “There was some kind of explosion at the Boston Marathon.”

He immediately went to his computer and pulled up a news site. A banner ran across the page. Breaking: Two explosions at the Boston Marathon.

No other information. I pulled up the Drudge Report on my phone. Nothing on it. Then I went to Twitter.

“Oh my god what just happened?”

“We heard two loud booms at the finish line.”

“My friend is running!”

“Blood everywhere.”

“Are we under attack?”

“Chaos in #Boston.”

The pictures were graphic and raw. Blood-drenched sidewalks. People crumpled on the ground. Medics and runners running into the smoke. A 5-second video showed the explosion itself, a burst of orange flames in the stands near the finish line.

I couldn’t look away. It seemed neither could anyone else as the video and photos were retweeted over and over. Soon journalists stepped up, tweeting at others to stop retweeting the graphic images out of respect for the victims.

News outlets started tweeting at eyewitnesses for more information. The Red Cross tweeted where to go for help and how to donate blood. The hashtag #PrayersforBoston began trending on Twitter. It seemed everyone in the world was watching the chaos at the marathon unfold in real-time.

But they weren’t. In the hour after the explosion, I watched as oblivious users and brands tweeted mundanely. Other users tweeted back angrily.

“Don’t you know what’s going on in #Boston?”

“Now is not the time for ads.”

Soon brands began tweeting in support of Boston. Many fell silent.

Then the rumors and false reports started coming through Twitter. There were more bombs. Sandy Hook survivors had been injured. 12 were dead. A fire was raging at JFK Library.

Was Boston under attack? I didn’t know. No one knew. And so into the night we stayed on Twitter and Facebook, looking for the freshest news and for assurances–assurances that our friends and family were safe, that we knew who was behind the bombings, and that ultimately we were going to be okay.

—

It’s the new normal, turning to social media during breaking news. It makes sense, considering Twitter can travel faster than the waves of an earthquake. If you can see live video of an event and hear the reactions from someone on the scene, why wouldn’t you go there first?

But it’s a really new new normal. Six years ago today, a gunman opened fire on campus at Virginia Tech. Thirty-two people and the gunman were killed, making it the deadliest shooting rampage in modern American history.

While covering that story, I think the media discovered the power of social media. My colleagues at Time Magazine and I certainly did. This is how I remember it.

—

On the morning of Monday, April 16, 2007, I was sitting at my desk in Time’s Washington bureau. Although I was 22 and a year out of school, I probably looked 18.

Around 9:30 a.m., I noticed a headline on CNN — Shooting at Virginia Tech, Two Believed Dead. I returned to my work. Random, small shootings like that were becoming so common.

But two hours later, the story shifted dramatically. News broke that the gunman had returned to the campus and opened fire in an academic building. More than 20 people were dead and many more injured. After hanging up on a conference call, my editor walked over to my desk. “We need you to get to the scene,” he said.

“Of course,” I replied. “But why?”

“We need you to interview people on the ground there and send what you find back to New York,” he said.

“OK, but how will I get there?” I asked.

“Book a flight if you can. Do whatever it takes to get there as quickly as possible.”

The winds in Washington were high that day, so high that the planes at the airports were grounded. I would have to drive by myself to campus. I quickly bought a map of Virginia, rented a car, stopped at home to grab a change of clothes and hit the road, headed west.

Virginia Tech is located in a small college town called Blacksburg. Blacksburg is about 270 miles southwest of Washington, D.C. To get there, you have to drive through the Blue Ridge Mountains. Being from Illinois, I had never driven in the mountains before and hugged the right lane as 18-wheelers barreled past. For the first two hours, I listened to NPR and its grim reports out of Blacksburg. Then I switched it off, trying to stay calm. The sun was setting and I was still 90 miles from campus.

—

I arrived on campus at 7 p.m., almost 12 hours after the first round of shootings had taken place in a dorm. A dozen news trucks were parked outside the alumni center, now the makeshift press center. I parked my car and was walking into the center when a reporter with a cameraman stopped me.

“What did you see?” He asked, putting a microphone to my face. “Did you see the gunman? Do you know anyone who was killed?”

“No!” I snapped, waving back the microphone. “I’m a reporter, too. Leave me alone!”

Realizing that everyone would mistake for me a student, I put my press pass on around my neck and walked into the center. All things considered, it was very calm. Reporters were hunched over their laptops or talking quietly on their cellphones. Inside the auditorium, news crews had set up makeshift work spaces, computers and cords and empty cups strewn everywhere.

I took a seat in the back and opened my laptop to check my email, the first time I had done so since leaving Washington that afternoon. I called my editor in New York and he told me they needed color–to describe what campus looked like tonight and of course, to find people who had seen the shootings. Katie, our intern in New York, connected me to her friend who was a senior at Virginia Tech and was willing to talk to me.

I called him on his cell and he agreed to give me a tour of campus. We met outside his apartment a few blocks away and proceeded to walk to the center of campus where a makeshift memorial was forming. The winds were still high, so high that the candles at the memorial wouldn’t stay lit. The few students who were out walked together in groups, their hoodies pulled up against the cold and the reporters who were everywhere.

He took me to a nearby bar where his friends were gathered. I told them our conversation was off the record, not that it really mattered. They didn’t know anyone who had been shot, nor did they know anything about the gunman. Instead they sat quietly, staring at their beers with blank expressions. The next few days, I would see those blank expressions over and over. The entire town was in shock.

As we said goodnight, Katie’s friend told me to call him if I needed anything. I thanked him and told him I would.

I returned to the press center and filed my story to the editors waiting in New York. At 3 a.m., I pulled into a dingy hotel across town. Elaine, a correspondent from our bureau in Washington, had arrived there just before me. “Get to sleep,” she said. “Tomorrow’s going to be a long day.”

—

Four hours later, we were awake again, getting ready with the news on in the background. Elaine got off a call with New York and told me that Michael, a senior editor also based in our bureau, had driven up over night and would meet us at the press center. We each got into our cars and drove back to campus.

Overnight, the press center had turned into a media zoo. In the parking lot, I counted at least 60 news trucks, their license plates from many different states. On the sprawling lawn beside the press center, the networks had staked out their turf. Celebrity journalists sat in directors chairs, waiting to go live. Inside the press center, every seat in the auditorium was taken.

We staked out a spot in the lobby near a power outlet. Michael quickly gave us our assignments. He was going to figure out who the gunman was and Elaine was going to report on the university’s mishandling of the shooting. It was my job to track down the students who had escaped the gunman.

Okay, Tracy, you can do this, I thought. I sat on the floor and opened up my laptop, unsure where to start. Suddenly, several news crews rushed past me and out the door. “Where are you going?” I asked a cameraman.

“We just got word that students are starting to line up outside the football field,” he said. “The president is going to be speaking there later.”

Students! I thew my laptop in my bag and raced with the news crews across campus. Sure enough, a line of students was beginning to form outside the main entrance to the football field. I made sure my press pass was visible as I approached a group of students.

“Hi, my name is Tracy and I’m a reporter with Time,” I said to them. “Would you be willing to talk to me?”

The students stared at me. Silently, they circled closer around one guy who looked like he was about to throw up or cry or both. “I’m sorry, we’d really rather not,” someone said.

“Of course, I’m so sorry,” I said and backed away slowly.

Two girls were standing a few feet away. “We will talk to you,” one girl said. “We’ve been looking for our friend Austin for the past day. We called all of the hospitals, but we can’t find her. Have you heard of her?”

I told them I didn’t, that I just got to campus the night before.

“We don’t know what else to do,” the girl said, “so we thought we would come here and wait to hear the president speak.”

“I’m so sorry,” was all I could think to say. “I will be praying for Austin, her family and for you.”

“Thank you,” the girl said.

Later I learned that Austin was among the students who had died. Thinking back on it, I could have interviewed the girls about Austin and their thoughts on the shooting. As a reporter, it would have been the smart thing to do. But I was on my own and had no reference point for any of this. What’s more, I couldn’t stop thinking how these students were my age and looked and sounded and dressed just like my friends.

Just as I said good-bye to the girls, a middle-aged reporter passed me. “I need to talk to students from Kentucky!” He shouted. “Anyone from Kentucky? I need to talk to students from Kentucky!”

No one spoke. I wanted to slap him. This wasn’t how you treated people who had just lost their friends and possibly survived the unthinkable. He was the reason the media had a terrible reputation during stories like this.

As I headed back to the press center, another news crew stopped me. Once more, a reporter thrust a microphone in my face. This time I said nothing and flashed my press pass in her face. There had to be a better, more empathic way to find the survivors.

—

Just months earlier, Facebook opened its doors to the public and let anyone have a profile who wanted one. As a reporter, I had used Facebook as a tool in my reporting for Time. I also wrote a few stories about Facebook’s growing impact. So it made sense to use it as a tool at Virginia Tech.

The problem was that I was not a student at Virginia Tech. This meant I could only see the names and profile photos of the students in the Virginia Tech. It was almost impossible to see anything else on their profiles. To do so, I would need to login as a Virginia Tech student.

Luckily, Katie, was already on it. Her friend, the Virginia Tech senior, agreed to let us use his Facebook login. We were in.

I sat on the floor outside the press center, IMing back and forth with Katie in New York. We had to find students that were either in the dorm or the classrooms the gunman had entered. We had gotten the course names from earlier news reports, so we knew to look for a French class and an engineering class. We pulled up the names of hundreds of students registered for those courses. We would have to go through their profiles, one by one. It would take hours to go through all of them.

As we were splitting up the list, a freelancer named Annie arrived at the press center. Our editor in New York had hired her to help us out with the reporting. She agreed to help Katie and me go through Facebook, looking for students who had seen the gunman. And so we sat together, hunched over our laptops and pouring over Facebook profiles. I quickly learned how to tell if a student had seen something.

If a student had survived, he would have posted a status update like, “I’m OK. Thanks for your prayers, I’ll be in touch soon.”

If a student had been injured, his friends would have written posts on his wall like, “We are praying for your recovery.”

If a student had been killed, his friends would have written posts on his wall like, “We will always remember you.”

I soon became desensitized to what I saw on Facebook. It was as if I was operating on auto-pilot, scanning a profile in 15 seconds and moving onto the next, looking for a student who could talk to us. If I had stopped to process what I was seeing, I would have started crying and called my mom. I didn’t have time to cry. We had less than 24 hours until the magazine went to press. We had to find students who had seen the gunman.

When we found a student who might have seen something, we took turns messaging the student. Because we were using another Virginia Tech student’s login, we had to identify ourselves as reporters.

“Hi,” I wrote to each student. “My name is actually Tracy Schmidt. I’m 22 years old and I’m a reporter with Time Magazine. This is my email address and this is my cell phone number. Will you talk to me?”

A couple of students messaged back to me and agreed to talk on the phone. I was talking to a girl who lived in the dorm when Annie got the message that changed everything. His name was Clay Violand and he was in the French class when the gunman entered. He couldn’t call Annie because his phone was still in the classroom. Could he email Annie instead? Yes, she said. We never could have predicted what came next.

Clay emailed Annie his first-person account of how the gunman entered his classroom and started shooting everyone. Clay dove under his desk and played dead. He listened as his classmates were shot and died.

“I had come to accept my death, but the fear was still there,” he wrote. “I was terrified that my parents weren’t going to be able to go on after I was gone. I kept thinking about my parents. There was a girl in front of me– I didn’t know her well. I didn’t know her name. We kept eye contact from time to time. She was brave. I don’t think she cried. We just started at each other under the desks.

When the gunman finally left, I heard the police barge in the hallway doors and yell ‘get down! Get down!’ The cops pounded on the door and asked someone to open it. I think eventually they just came in and told us to walk out if we could. I got up and put my hands up. Just me and that one girl next to me got up. She had a gunshot wound — I hope she is OK. I think she is — she was walking. I am so proud of her for staying calm. She would have been the last person I had made eye contact with on this earth if I had died.”

Annie immediately showed his email to Michael, the editor sitting with us. “Verify it,” he said. “You got it from Facebook.”

In other words, it could have been a hoax. I ran to the makeshift press office and asked if the woman behind the counter could verify if Clay had been in the French class. “I’m sorry,” she said, “but privacy rules forbid me from telling you what students are enrolled in a certain class.”

We would need to find another way. Annie and I both tracked down Clay’s mother. She lived in Maryland. I called the number listed in the yellow pages online. I got her voicemail and left a message, saying that we had been in contact with her son and needed to verify his story. Luckily for us, Clay’s mother called us both back.

“How is he?” She asked me. “I haven’t been able to talk to him because he doesn’t have his phone.”

I told her that I thought he seemed okay but clearly traumatized based on the email. I also told her that I would be praying for him and everyone. Being a young journalist, I didn’t know if I was allowed to say things like that. In j-school, we were taught to always be objective and distant from our sources. It was the distance that allowed us to tell the story factually and without bias. But no journalism class could have prepared us to cover Virginia Tech and interview survivors who were exactly our age.

After getting off the phone with Clay’s mom, Annie gave Michael the all-clear. He in turn gave New York the all-clear. Within minutes, Clay’s email ran as an exclusive on Time.com. It was soon linked to by other websites, including the Drudge Report, and it quickly went viral. The next morning, Clay told his story on NPR.

—

Without Facebook, and more importantly a Facebook login to the Virignia Tech network, we would have never found Clay.

But Annie, Katie and I weren’t the only journalists using Facebook that day. Members of the student newspaper, the Collegiate Times, were also pouring over Facebook at their seats in the press center. In fact, almost every person who stayed put in the press center was under 25 years old. Everyone else was doing reporting the old way by knocking on doors. We didn’t realize it then, but we had found a new way to do reporting–with social media.

In the six years since, I’ve told this story to lots of people across the country. Many of those people have been journalists and educators who wanted to understand what we did with Facebook and, more importantly, whether it was ethical. Some older journalists argued that it was unethical because we had used someone else’s Facebook login to message the students. I held that it was ethical because we had permission to use his account and because we clearly identified ourselves as journalists. Most people agree with this point.

Social media has also exploded since April 2007. At the time, Twitter was a brand-new service used mostly by techies. Tumblr had launched two months earlier. Instagram didn’t even exist yet.

Now, as we saw with the Boston Marathon, social media has become the first place that everyone–including journalists themselves–turns to for information. The advantage is that information from the scene is immediately distributed to the masses. The disadvantage is that incorrect information is shared and becomes treated as fact until proven otherwise. This is why we will always need journalists.

Yesterday afternoon, within 30 minutes of the bombings and amidst the conflicting reports, one tweet stood out to me. It was from my former colleague at Time Magazine, Jay Newton-Small.

It read simply: “Heading to Boston.”

My dad picked my name.

If my mom had her way, I would be Hannah Rachel Schmidt. If my brother had his way, I would be Courtesy Schmidt–named after a hardware store, of course. (He was three.)

But legend has it that shortly before I was born, my dad decided on Tracy Samantha. His inspiration? Katharine Hepburn’s character in A Philadelphia Story, Tracy Samantha Lord.

Photo credit: Classic Film Scans

I’ve seen the movie a few times and have yet to like her character. She’s a spoiled, self-absorbed heiress trying to decide between her ex-husband, Cary Grant, and the other guy, John Howard. My dad says he just liked the sound of her name.

Tracy Samantha is a big name for a little girl, though, so I just went by Tracy. In high school, when I started writing a column for our town newspaper, my dad asked if I would include my middle name.

“No, it’s too much,” I said. “Everyone knows me as Tracy Schmidt.”

In Park Ridge, Illinois there was only one Tracy Schmidt. But in the wider world, it turned out, there are other Tracy Schmidt’s.

In 2006, I was a reporter in Time Magazine’s Washington, D.C. bureau. While working on a story, I had to call the RNC for a quote. Their spokeswoman’s name? Tracy Schmidt.

“Yes, hello, I’d like to speak to Tracy Schmidt,” I told the receptionist.

“Your name?” he asked.

“Tracy Schmidt,” I said.

“No, I know that,” he replied. “What is your name?”

“Tracy Schmidt.”

“Right, what is your name?”

We went around like this a few more times before he transferred me to another receptionist. Eventually I made it to the right Tracy Schmidt, got the quote and hung up.

The next week, when the magazine was going to press, I asked my editor to include my middle name on my byline. He said ok — until he saw the page proof.

“Tracy, look at your name,” he said. “Do you realize your middle name takes up an entire line of extra copy?”

“Yes, I see that,” I replied. “Is that a problem?”

He rolled his eyes, shook his head at the entitled Millennial and walked away.

He saw it as vanity. I saw it as the only way to separate myself from the spokeswoman of the RNC who would later become Sarah Palin’s press secretary.

In 2006, the media didn’t talk about SEO. It was something the tech producers for the website knew about. The magazine’s reporters didn’t know about SEO or were told to factor into their stories. Reporters certainly didn’t care about their personal web presence then. Even thinking about the web was a sign that the good times of print were ending.

But I was 22 years old and  knew that my web presence was going to matter. So I started using “Tracy Samantha Schmidt” everywhere — in my stories for Time, on all of my social profiles, in my email addresses and signatures, everywhere. In 2008, when I joined Twitter, I selected the username @TracySamantha.

The name stuck. Now when people meet me offline for the first time, they call me “Tracy Samantha.” I quickly correct them that I go by Tracy in real life.

“Then what’s with the Samantha?”

“It’s my professional name.”

“Ah.”

It could look like I’m being pretentious, insisting on “Tracy Samantha Schmidt” wherever my name appears. Really, I’m just thinking about personal online reputation management.

It’s a phrase that didn’t exist in 2006 when I switched my byline. In the years since then, personal online reputation management has become an important–and lucrative–part of the SEO industry. Essentially, it is the complex process of grooming your personal search results so that only the good stuff turns up.

A common problem is like the one I faced at Time — you share the same name as someone else. When someone Googles you, their stuff comes up over yours. Hopefully it’s mundane. One of my colleagues at Crain Communications, a family-owned media company, shares the same name as a male underwear model. Enough said.

If you do share the same name as someone else, it can be very difficult to differentiate yourself in search results. My recommendation is to begin using your middle initial or middle name everywhere, just as I did. Unfortunately this can take several months to kick in and it doesn’t always work. That is why some executives will shell out thousands of dollars to SEO consultants and publicists to correct the problem.

Should you want to know more about personal online reputation management and what you can do yourself, I made a PDF last fall called “You 2.0: Managing Your Personal Online Reputation.”  It’s helped a lot of people and I hope it gives you a few ideas, too.

Just before take-off, there is a moment.

“At this time, please turn off all cellphones and put away your laptops and other electronic devices.”

It’s a moment we say we hate, but secretly, we look forward to it. The excuse to disconnect–what a luxury.

The average American spends at least six hours per day staring at a screen. Among highly educated adults, that number is even higher.

We are staring at screens on our cell phones, tablets, laptops and TVs. Throughout our day, we see more screens in our cars, at the checkout, the bus stop, the back of a cab. Soon we will have screens in our kitchens, our laundry rooms, our nurseries.

These screens can make our lives more efficient. They remind us what to do. They alert us when something is wrong. They connect us to information and to each other in seconds.

But, on the flip side, these screens can prevent a good night’s sleep,  increase our risk for heart attacks and strokes,  and cause a slew of mental illnesses ranging from depression to psychosis.

If you shut off your screen right now, I won’t be offended. But why don’t you print out this post first?  Print, after all, is becoming a luxury.

The experience of sitting down with a newspaper or magazine is an intimate experience. There are no pop-up ads, no breaking news tickers, no tallies of how many people shared the story, no comments from other readers, no updates to the story itself. And because its technology is limited to ink on paper, there are no inbox pings, no Facebook alerts, no texts, no calls, nothing. Just you and the words on the page.

For 15 minutes or for several hours, you can read at your own pace without distraction. You likely find yourself sitting longer with a story, absorbing it rather than scanning it. Without the input of others, you draw your own conclusions about what you read. And without Most-Read and Recommended-for-You lists, you can only discover new stories and photos by turning the page. You will read stories you would never click online. Your awareness is expanded, your opinions challenged rather than affirmed.

On a deeper level, your body is recharging. You are likely curled up in a comfortable chair or in bed, a mug of coffee or a glass of wine on the table beside you. Your eyes, neck, shoulders and fingers are relaxed because you are not hunched over, scrolling across a glaring screen. Your mind may wonder from the page, but it’s likely to a place of deep thought or daydreams. You may gently fall asleep or you may spring out of your seat, ready to take the day on.

What I’ve said so far may strike you as ironic given my background. In 2009, at the Chicago Tribune, I co-created a website called ChicagoNow. It is a network of hundreds of blogs written by writers, some of whom are paid for their work and many of whom contribute because they like the community and the platform. At the time, I believed ChicagoNow and socially-connected, constantly-updated sites like it were the future of journalism. Printed newspapers and magazines would be gone within five years, ten years tops.

Yet four years later, print is not dead. In 2012, the Wall Street Journal, the nation’s largest newspaper, reported 2.5% annual growth in circulation for its weekend print edition. In 2011 and 2012, the New York Times also reported a slight growth in the circulation for its weekend print editions.

To be sure, these numbers are modest. By no means will circulation numbers ever come close to rebounding completely. Yet these trends at the Journal and the Times indicate that readers still want a printed publication on the weekends, a time when they have time to actually sit down and read.

Time Magazine predicted this trend in 2007 when it changed its delivery date to Friday from Monday. Reported New York Magazine:

The magazine’s own internal research showed that people were more willing to read news in print on the weekends, after they’d trolled the Web for headlines all week. “That means you close the magazine in the middle of the week, and you’re giving up this idea of ‘There was a week, it had news, and here’s what it was,’ and it becomes more of something you do—more forward-looking, more contextual analysis,” says [John Huey, the editor-in-chief of Time Magazine's parent company, Time Inc.]

When Time made the switch in 2007, I was a staff reporter and web producer in the magazine’s Washington, D.C. bureau. Rick Stengel, Time’s managing editor, visited the bureau to announce the changes. “We know that our readers have about 45 minutes on average to spend on reading on the weekend,” he said. “We want them spending those 45 minutes reading Time.”

It was a bold decision. Six years later, I believe it’s why Time continues to put out a print magazine every week and Newsweek does not.

In the coming years, as we want and need more breaks from screens, I believe print will experience great innovation. This fall, Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar’s print edition will face a surprising new competitor: Net-a-Porter, the luxury e-commerce website. Last week, New York Magazine reported the latest details:

“Net-a-Porter’s big, yet-to-be-named print project will be ready this fall. Meant to compete with Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar, the 300-page magazine — price also TBD — should publish four to six times a year.”

An e-commerce website as print publisher? It is only the beginning. As Facebook looks for new revenue models while battling user fatigue, why wouldn’t it consider becoming a publisher? The world’s largest social network owns the rights to content produced by more than one billion people. Every media company uses Facebook to drive traffic and build audiences. Advertisers want more ways to reach Facebook’s users.  Could we see a printed newspaper or magazine published by Facebook?  Maybe.

We are already seeing experiments with print by start-ups. In September, Editor and Publisher reported on a Swiss company that is testing the concept of a “personalized” newspaper delivered daily to your doorstep:

For the past nine months, Swiss readers have been creating their own customized paper online, choosing daily content options from a dozen national and international publications. Logistics firm Swiss Post Intl. delivers the German-language newspapers the following day. “This means that readers can combine information from different publishers, depending on what they are interested in and their reading habits,” said Carsten Vossmeyer, head of press/publishers at Swiss Post, which successfully tested the personalized paper concept three years ago under the name Personal News.

This innovation of print is a fascinating topic. I could go and on, but my eyes hurt from staring at my laptop and this pain in my shoulders is only getting worse. Plus there’s a stack of newspapers on my coffee table waiting to be read.

What are your thoughts?  Do you find yourself wanting to put down your screens and pick up a newspaper or magazine? Would you pay to have a personalized publication delivered to your doorstep every day or week? Please share your comments below and let’s talk about it.

It’s a basic question and everyone seems to have a different answer. Frankly, I’m still figuring it out myself and I have been using Twitter since 2008.

Technically, you don’t have to follow another user on Twitter to see what he is tweeting. You simply have to know what his username—or handle—is and pull it up online. To see my tweets, you would go to www.twitter.com/tracysamantha.

(The exception, of course, is if a Twitter user has marked his account private and has to give you permission to view his tweets. But hardly anyone uses a private Twitter account, so we’ll skip this topic for now.)

The reason you would follow a Twitter user is to “keep up” with what he’s tweeting. That is, of course, if he happens to be tweeting right as you’re looking at your Twitter homepage. If you’re following many Twitter users, you probably won’t see his tweets just by looking at your homepage. You’ll have to pull up his Twitter account—which again, you can see without actually following him.

The other reason you would follow him is so that he can direct message, or DM, you. Unless you’re following a user, he cannot DM you. This can be embarrassing when you tweet at someone to DM you and he publicly replies, “I’m sorry I can’t DM you because you’re not following me.”

Currently, I follow just under 1000 Twitter users. I know, it’s way too many people and brands to keep up with. That’s why I use Twitter Lists to keep track of the users I really care about—i.e. friends, colleagues, smart peers, news accounts and entertaining people.

Some days, I think I should unfollow everyone on Twitter except for these users that I really care about. Other days, I think I should follow absolutely everyone who is following me—except, of course, for those girls in their underwear.

Every day, I ask myself questions like:

“She attended my seminar and asked a really great question. But I’ll probably never see her again. Should I follow her?”

“He was a really great co-worker. Six years ago. Should I follow him?”

“Technically, she’s my direct competitor. I don’t want my potential clients finding her through my account. Should I follow her?”

“We keep running into each other at networking events and I feel like a jerk for not following him. But he’s so obnoxious online. Should I follow him?”

I have one friend who follows less than 100 people on Twitter. I am not one of them because to him, I’m not an interesting or entertaining enough Twitter user to follow. He still replies to my tweets when I tweet at him. It’s a polite and rather ballsy approach.

I am not ballsy. I am Catholic with a lot of guilt and about 4,000 Twitter followers I’m currently not following.

So should I follow them all? Or should I unfollow the 500 Twitter accounts I currently follow but never actually read? I would love to hear your thoughts and I’m thinking many other people would as well.

My 10-year high school reunion was last month. I didn’t want to go because Facebook has made reunions irrelevant. If I wanted to see what a classmate was up to, I just had to look her up on Facebook.

My mom insisted I go. “It will be good for your confidence,” said Mom, ever the therapist. “You still see yourself as an awkward teenager.”

In high school, I wasn’t a nerd. I just really liked journalism– enough to be an editor of every publication at our high school and a columnist at our town paper. Maybe I did like to hang out in the lobby of Tribune Tower and pretend that I worked at the Chicago Tribune. And maybe I did read every issue of the Columbia Journalism Review cover to cover. Ok, maybe I was a nerd.

At times, I still feel like my awkward 17-year-old self. But don’t we all? Facebook can’t get rid of that feeling because you’re probably posting to it in your pajamas like I am right now.

So I decided to go to my high school reunion. And just like every high school dance, I spent the weeks beforehand obsessing about my outfit, my hair and who I would go with. In the end, I decided to go stag–just like I did to every dance the first two years of high school.

I got to the bar over an hour late, having misread the Facebook invite for the reunion. Not that it mattered. Everyone had already assembled in the exact same cliques from high school: jocks, thespians, slackers, punks and nerds. In the back room of the bar, there were probably 150 people gathered, roughly a fourth of our graduating class.

I realized that I was Facebook friends with almost all of them. Even though I hadn’t seen them in a decade, I knew so much about them–where they are working, who they are engaged or married to, where they went to college, even what their siblings are doing.

Still, I couldn’t bring myself to talk to most of them. What would I say? Certainly not: “Hey I saw your wedding photos. I wouldn’t have gone with teal, but whatever works. Your macaroon cake looked great. And god, your husband is hot.”

Instead I stood in the back with the other nerds, all of whom were much smarter and more successful than me in high school. I never expected what came next.

One by one, classmates came up to me to say they’ve been following my life on Facebook and they were so impressed with my career. “You go to so many glamorous parties!”said one girl. “You’re, like, famous now!” said another. “And you’re so thin!” said a third. I blushed and deflected the compliments.

It was exactly what you want to hear at your high school reunion. Facebook hadn’t made my reunion irrelevant. Ironically, it had already done the bragging for me.

Thirty minutes later, I hopped in a cab. I didn’t get the chance to say good-bye to everyone, but it didn’t matter. We are friends on Facebook.