Social Media Reflection
A thorough Google search of my name and email address would return a
flurry of results detailing my digital life for the past ten years,
depending on which email address one searched. I have been online
using social media for the second half of my short life, as is
illustrated in old Xanga accounts, an inactive but existent MySpace,
the ghost of my once great Facebook, and my current, and very active,
Twitter and Tumblr accounts. I consider these to be my main outlets of
social media, in addition to my Gmail account, and frequent them quite
often.
Facebook used to consume a great deal of my free, or not so free as it
often was, time. Toward the end of my stint with Facebook I was no
longer posting prophetic statuses and snapshots, but was largely using
it to keep updated on my friends’ lives: who was pregnant, who was
married, who recently died of a drug overdose. It was a great tool for
keeping tabs on people who you did not see in your real life, which
was also the reason I deleted it. As it seems to be the trend for many
of the school of heartbreak, I left Facebook so as to not be
distracted by the posts of my recent ex-girlfriend. Come to find out
she deleted hers days after my final log-off.
ingrained in my life. There are various apps installed on my wi-fi
enabled iPod Touch and Blackberry for a constant feed of my daily
musings. Often these are rants about what I don’t feel like doing,
what the freak next to me does feel like doing, and for basic
communication with people who don’t need to know my phone number.
Lately I’ve also been using Twitter to keep updated on news and goings
on about town, mainly because it is updated much more frequently than
traditional news sources. This has become part of my professional life
as well, as my internship requires I find original content for
stories. Accounts like @NYScanner have great updates about crime that
would normally be heard on a police scanner. Tumblr is now the greatest time suck in my life. I’m not entirely sure
what the purpose of the website is, but I use it to post brief
personal blogs and a phenomenal amount of images, both original and
reblogged, that peak my interest. Everything from bicycles, to baby
animals, to nude women, and the current song I’m listening to can be
found on my Tumblr. This site is less used to communicate with people
and more used for browsing content that others have posted, though I
suppose it still qualifies as social media. Finally, we come to the boring platform of email. I’ve been using it
as long as I’ve had a computer; it just infiltrates my life
significantly more now. It’s the more bland of all social media that I
use and if I didn’t need to keep in touch with professors and the
textbook company that sent me the wrong book, I’d surely get rid of it
all together. While some people may view email as the most basic
social medium for some reason I can’t explain it does not seem like
one to me at all. Perhaps there is not enough going on for my taste.
Sarah Nelson