In class this past week, we ended up discussing whether or not we were being too critical of social media technologies as scholars on the subject. As I’m sure many others in the class would agree, this type of conversation comes up often in communications courses, as you are looking extremely hard at very personal habits of interaction, picking them apart in hopes of best understanding them and their functions.
However, looking back on my first post, I was surprised to see that it appears I have been cynical about social media from the start! Reflecting back, I actually almost feel like I am less distrustful of social media sites now than I was at the start of the course since I now understand the full picture of social media—from its history to its use to its business properties—more than I did in the beginning.
In my first post, I looked back at the timeline of my social media use, from email to Facebook and everything in-between. After reading the selections on adolescent social media use, my experience seems almost uncannily normal. Embarrassingly enough, I easily could have fit into the statistics of how teens used Myspace from Dobson’s study on young Australian women, as I took the same “goofy” types of pictures and posted the same quotes and song lyrics that I dedicated to “mah gurlz.” There is definitely something humbling about realizing that no, you are not the only person who had these sort of experiences and interactions with a medium—in fact, you are one out of millions who probably used it in almost an identical way.
The main issue I raised with social media in my original post had been about privacy, which is definitely still a concern of mine today. As I am now actually about to graduate and my job search is becoming more and more of a priority, I have absolutely made some changes in my use of social media, from changing my name on my Facebook profile in hopes of becoming even more difficult for employers to find to updating my LinkedIn page in hopes that an employer will find it.
Reading pieces such as boyd’s “Facebook’s Privacy Trainwreck” reminded me of how actually terrifying it had been when Facebook implemented their Newsfeed and made me nervous about the Timeline change on the horizon (speaking of which, does anyone know when that’s happening?). The idea of my personal profiles becoming more accessible still makes me extremely uncomfortable, and it is evident from pieces such as boyd’s that I am not alone in that feeling.
But at the same time, my experience in seeing how “normal” my use of social media was made me realize that while these companies may have access to my information, it is not as “personal” as I always believed it to be. Can they track the websites I am on? Yes. But are any of them really monitoring me as anything more than a product? Aside from the companies I am applying to that are probably vetting me via Google, most likely not. I think many people panic that their lives are completely out on display, but when millions—if not billions—of users are revealing this same information, it seems significantly less damaging.
Therefore, while I still am very stringent about the sort of information I am willing to share, I do feel that this course gave me more of a perspective on social media and its role in our lives. It made me realize that while social media sites are designed to be able to be used as your profile and your platform of communication, they are not at all about you—they are in truth massive businesses that you are simply a statistic in. While I guess I always knew this in the back of my mind, this course really helped me conceptualize how large the industry of social media is. Really looking at it, it is almost incomprehensible to try to grasp the size and sphere on social media, and I honestly believe that an entire major could (and probably will) be devoted towards studies of it in the near future. It is such a fast-growing field, both in the number of adopters and of academics on the subject, so it is very interesting to have started studying it as this point when there is significant knowledge of it but still so much to learn.
- Colleen