Social Media and Me... Now
Since this semester started, my relationship with social media has changed, probably not in ways very obvious to an outside observer, but that are nonetheless significant to me. While I was always analytical about social media and constantly assessed all of my mediated interactions on SNSs, it was predominantly from a perspective instilled in me through my training in digital strategy. It was more of me examining what people were choosing to share, how they were sharing, and what kind of information or content dominated media channels at any given time.
While I have always been interested in mediated identity performance, and paid attention to that as well when online, the readings provided me with a deeper level of understanding. My explorations of self-presentation online became more salient with the knowledge of research on how taste preferences and class can manifest themselves in various ways on SNSs.
Moreover, I find myself tuned into a finer level of detail online Things I once paid no attention to or brushed off, deeming them inconsequential or merely circumstantial, have taken on a new life in my eyes. Perhaps the set of readings that made the greatest impact of me was the group of readings on race. Thanks to these articles, I look for more cues of race politics online. Suddenly, I am more interested in how diverse my friends’ friends are, not to mention my own.
Overall, while my day-to-day social media routine has probably not changed much, my tools in understanding it have. Through discussions in class, I have new discourses with which to arm myself in trying to make self of SNSs. Some were already familiar to me, such as those on gender or youth, but other units, like the one on race, have helped to enrich my understanding of how SNSs impact our everyday lives.Â