My Use of Social Media

 As much as I hate to admit it, a typical day starts with me shutting off my iPhone alarm and then almost immediately checking my personal and professional email accounts. Working in the media field, my bosses and colleagues tend to be similarly glued to their smartphones, so seeing my daily influx of emails reminds me that no, I can’t hit that snooze button, it’s time to get up and get going! Reading my emails as soon as I wake up gives me an idea of what I need to accomplish that day, as well as what's going on in the world from all of the newsletters I subscribe to.

 

There is definitely an irony in email being the social medium I am most reliant on today, as it was one of the first social sites I joined but also the first I dismissed. When I became active on the Internet socially in middle school, I found email to be rather boring due to its slow pace and used it sparingly, mostly to manage my accounts with other websites. As many of my classmates have noted, AIM was the place to be for preteens including myself, and I had the screen name and the embarrassingly emo profile lyrics to prove it. 

 

Stereotypically of my generation, the next step for me was to get a Xanga—or five. I began with one I wrote my day-to-day life in and quickly created others that were more focused on my interests. It’s funny to see now how Tumblr and fashion blogging has taken off and become such a phenomenon, as I was using my Xanga as a site to post my favorite fashion photos, videos, and even outfit pictures as young as 14 (of course, the majority of my “fashionable” finds were from Abercrombie, so I was far from being the undiscovered Anna Wintour). 

 

When I entered high school, I “matured” out of my Xanga and moved onto MySpace. I was quite active in this as well, though the interpersonal social implications of high school (such as joining extracurricular activities, getting a later curfew, and being allowed to date) definitely impacted my use of social media. Though I had the cool "skins" and uploaded the mandatory "MySpace mirror pics," I did not have many actual conversations with my friends through the site. Therefore, my interest eventually faded, and I actually had a sizable lag between when I really stopped posting on my MySpace and when I got a Facebook at age 16. I was at first very against the whole Facebook idea and thought it was bizarre but soon found myself sucked into its social web as more and more friends pushed me towards it (one of my friends actually created my page when I initially refused).

My Twitter involvement went along a similar path—I was not interested in having a profile but found myself “peer pressured” into it, though this time it was not by a friend but from my boss (I worked for a start-up website that was adamant about employees utilizing social media to promote it). Admittedly, I have become a fan of Twitter and actually worked for a semester managing the social media profiles of a bakery, with a focus on continuously updating their Twitter and hosting “Twitter chats.” 

 

While email, Facebook, and Twitter take up the majority of the time I spend using social media, I do try to maintain a LinkedIn profile for potential employers as well. Being interested in entering the journalism field, I also use YouTube to post my video work and have contributed pieces to various interactive blogs and websites. Though I have been invited and tempted to join Tumblr and Google +, I have reached a point where I do not wish to have any more of my personal information on the Internet. With graduation looming, I am more than aware that my presence online will be viewed just as much as my resume by future employers and that definitely weighs into just how public I want my social interactions to be. 


Colleen Hagerty