My Use of Social Media

Normal 0 0 2 false false false EN-US JA X-NONE

How I started to use social media to communicate with other people is slightly different. My first use of social media, which was Email, did not start by using my personal computer, but my cell phone. I had not created any email accounts for my PC or done any online chatting with my friends until my junior year of high school, when I needed to create it to communicate with my host family living in Ohio. In my fourth grade, I had been already taught a basic use of the Internet in computer class, but I did not really use the PC at my home except when I need to use a search engine. PC was not so necessary for me. In order to communicate with my friends, instead, I exchanged emails by using my cell phone and its email address provided by a carrier (in my case, it was Docomo).

I started to actively use other outlets of social media only after I came to the U.S. for university. Before that, my life was heavily dependent on my phone. I did almost everything I needed to do with my cell phone, such as sending emails, taking pictures, and downloading musics etc. After I left my country for the U.S. I started to use Hotmail to exchange messages and chat with my family and friends in different countries. And I created a mixi account (SNS used exclusively in Japan) to keep updated with my friends in home country, and also made my Facebook account in my sophomore year.

Since I got an access to Gmail this summer, I no longer check my Hotmail account so often and hardly sign in msn messenger for online chatting. Therefore, I would say, now the social media I am most active on are Gmail and Facebook. But the primary social media I use in my daily life can change depending on where I am. Gmail and Facebook are my main social media outlets when I am in the U.S..Once I go back to my country on vacation I do not use Gmail and especially not Facebook as often as I do here; I start to spend more time in using the email address of my Japanese cell phone and mixi.

Even though some of my friends have left social media, particularly Facebook, I cannot follow suit because I think it is still indispensable for my life. As cited in Ellison’s article, people seem to make use of SNSs like Facebook to retain and cultivate connections with friends whom they have already built up “offline relationship” with (221). I also use SNSs for this purpose. On Facebook or mixi, my friends and I can know about each other’s lives and feel a connection even when we are physically far away. Many of my friends have gone back to their homes not close from here, but as long as I see their activities or see them online on Facebook I feel that I am still connected with them. This is what I think is very helpful about SNSs that it let users to keep linked with their friends no matter how far they stay, and it is one of my primary reasons why I use SNSs. 

 Moreover, what social media technologies enabled us to do is to get back in touch with friends with ease. “Social media”, I think, should include any media using the Internet or mobile phone technologies, which allow users to achieve interactive communications among each other. With this “social media”, like Facebook, we can come back to friends, who we have not contacted for a while, and talk to them by sending such a short message like “Hi, how are you doing over there? I miss you!”. We do not have to think of a letter-long message. Whenever some friend pops out in our minds and wonder how he is doing, we can start a conversation by posting or sending a casual, brief message to him. I believe that this use of social media is important for a lot of users including me to sustain the “offline relationships” with a number of friends whom they cannot physically reach easily. 

Lastly, although I think social media is useful and necessary in my life now, I am not sure if I want to keep using it as much as I use now after I graduate from NYU. I am sure that I will use email systems in the future but I don’t know about SNSs. Actually I am logging in Facebook less times than before. I do not want to lose connections with my friends on Facebook, so I do not think I will deactivate it. But at the same time I am not feeling good about the fact that I can easily lose the connections once I break up with Facebook. There might be so many relationships I or my friends could have more cherished when we spent time together in the real world (not in the virtual world) if we had not known about Facebook. I feel, because people know they can meet anytime again in the virtual world, they tend to less solidify relationships in the real world. I just try to keep myself in a realm of social media because it is where my friends are, but to be honest, I do not stay there so willingly.

 

Sachi