My Social Media Use, Then and Now
In my first post, I outlined my own social media evolution from MySpace to Facebook, from Hotmail to Gmail, and how I slightly dabbled in Twitter. For the most part, none of my involvement in these sites has dramatically changed, but the way I look at my own and others' use of social media technologies has certainly been affected by this semester. Particularly, our discussions of calculated self-representation and audiences has stuck with me, so that whenever I'm about to click "submit" on any kind of Facebook post, I consider those who might see it and those who I subconsciously want to see it, and why I feel the need to post it. Which, in the end, usually just proves to psych myself out, so most of my written Facebook posts as of late are merely means to inform another person of something they need to know, rather than arbitrary personal statuses. My Twitter is still pretty dead, sadly, but I can still see myself potentially getting into it as my interest in Facebook fades.
In our studies of social media technologies, I have definitely become more attentive to the varying uses of these websites in my own sphere of friends, and how different ages, cultural backrounds, and occupations tend to use them differently. For example, my fourteen-year-old cousin, who was too young to ever have a MySpace and all the strange friend surveys that came with it, has taken to turning his Facebook status into little exposes of the sort. Today, his status was, "tbh....like!," where "tbh" apparently stands for "to be honest," and the 24 people who liked his status received wall posts from my cousin, "to be honest... i'm so mad i won't see you tonight! lol."
To be honest, I'd never seen Facebook used in this way, and after a bit of perusing, I found that all of his friends' statuses were like this. The worst of which was my cousin's friend's status, "Like for a rate," where teenage girls would "like" and subsequently receive a 1-10 on the "hottness" scale. At first I was appalled, but then I realized that this is exactly how we used MySpace at his age, and perhaps a factor in how it eventually became what it is today, because the interface seamlessly permitted such activity.
I think my use of social media will definitely change in the future. I'm always on the brink of deleting any given account, and am only on Facebook to stay informed of friends' birthdays and events. As I grow older and less interested in staying in-the-know, I'll surely delete my Facebook at some point or another. I doubt political issues would cause me to deactivate before then, but perhaps ethical issues regarding a brink of privacy could influence the decision. There are several tumblrs and blogspots that I frequent daily, and unless sites as such unexpectedly fail, I suspect that I will always frequent the blog-side of social media.
Jen L.