Social media use: now and then

Looking back to the beginning of the semester, I have noticed some slight changes in my use of social media—not necessarily in the types of social media (I still primarily use Facebook, Twitter, and email), but in the purpose. Ivy mentioned in her post that she has begun using social media as a branding tool, and I feel I have done this as well. While I still use my Facebook and Twitter accounts as a way of keeping up with my friends’ lives, I’ve noticed that I now pay much closer attention to the image of myself I’m projecting through my status updates, profile, and pictures. I’m much more conscious of the information that potential employers might be able to find on my social networking sites and want to make sure that my profiles give a favorable impression of me. It’s not too much of a change, because I’ve always been pretty cautious about the things I post online. But the knowledge that someone who could decide my future job might be evaluating my Facebook profile certainly informs my decisions now. I have also become much more active on Twitter because of this course (and also because a lot of my friends have recently started using Twitter…but I think I like using Twitter more thanks to CSMT).

 

Social media has taken on a whole new meaning for me after being in this class. I had never really thought critically about why I chose to make my profile look a certain way, list specific tastes or interests, or post certain types of pictures; I just did and that was that. Our readings really opened my eyes to the larger cultural shift in the way our generation negotiates identity, self-presentation, and friendships that has occurred because of social media. What really surprised me was how well I was able to relate to and recognize myself in the case studies and research projects that we read about. When I go back through the years of archived material on my Facebook and view it through the lens of these readings, I am able to fit my 16, 17, 18+ year old-self in perfectly with the adolescent girls discussed by Dobson, Banet-Weiser, and others. As Colleen said, it is certainly humbling to realize that so many other people have used these media in exactly the same ways you have.

 

I’m not sure if my personal social media use will change much in the future. One of my primary reasons for being an active Facebook and Twitter user is to easily share important updates in my life with the people I care about and that care about me. As I approach important milestones—graduation, my first real job, and possibly marriage and having kids further down the road—I know I will probably want to talk about those things just as I have with other past events. I’m sure that the landscape of social media will change as new sites and technologies are developed, but I feel that, now that we are so embedded in an environment of constant networked communications, it would be nearly impossible to ever truly go back to a world without social media as we know it.
 
-Nicole F // @nmf255