This Isn’t a Goodbye, It’s a See You Later

Wow, it’s been quite the semester. You could say it’s been 20 grueling weeks from hell or you could say it’s been 20 weeks of pleasant rainbows and happiness. To admit it this semester of “Social Media & Digital Communications” was a lot better than I thought it was going to be. Going into the class I thought it was going to be a super boring and dull class on how to post pictures to Facebook or how to tweet properly. It wasn’t that at all. I started my first blog (THIS!) and had a lot of fun with the new experiences. Experiences with Social Media, you could say, is the child of a pure genius. But I don’t want to give myself too much credit.

When I first made the blog I made it look tacky as a novelty. I had no colors matching and it looked like a kindergartner, no offense to any kindergartners, had been put in charge of the blog. But over time and once I started using it for more and more posts I got a little embarrassed at how it looked so one day during class I tried to make it look, not more professional, but just higher than 5 year old quality. Once I put that time into it, I just felt so much better about the whole blog in general.

With this class I saw a different side of social networking that I had never been exposed to because I’ve never been in charge of a business or company. But now I had a business (Experiences with Social Media) and I had to promote my blog across several different types of social media platforms so I could reach as many people as I could. The thing I didn’t realize is that people use more than Facebook or Twitter on a daily basis. There’s Reddit, Tumblr, and Foursquare and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. And each separate platform reaches out to different audiences in different ways. Reddit is a bulletin board like website. Tumblr is micro-blogging and Foursquare is all location-based.

I even made my first podcast, with a little help from my friend Rob over at Living in the Media. When I was little I wanted to work for ESPN but I just don’t have enough confidence in myself and my voice so I never went after. With the podcast I took a casual approach whereas everyone, to me, seemed like took an informative approach. I choose to talk about how social media has affected me in the last week because no one knows how much I use social media in a week. For heaven’s sake the first thing I do when I wake up is check my Facebook feed and twitter timeline! This week I even did the same thing, just talked about what I say happen on twitter in the past week. Whether it be a girl fight on Facebook or just a trend that appears on twitter. That’s what I want to talk about; it’ll be more fun and easier to talk about. Also, more than likely is more relateable to my listeners and readers of this blog because they’re involved in forms of social media too!

It’s been fun guys. Thanks for checking into my blog. You’ve all been so awesome, thanks for giving time out of YOUR day to read MY blog. It honestly means so much. I don’t want to make a promise saying that I’ll keep this blog and everything along with it. I would love to but I’m a college kid playing a college sport. I don’t have enough time to keep my own personal accounts going strong. That doesn’t mean that once in a while I won’t pop in and say hi and say what’s on my mind because I may but I just don’t like making promises and breaking them. Thanks everyone, stay awesome!

Now let me stop before I start crying..

Second Podcast

It’s That Time of Year!

Hello WordPress world, it’s starting to get to that time of year with big dinner’s and presents and just being with family. Around Thanksgiving and Christmas there is always thankfulness in the air. But not everyone has it necessarily easy as you and I. Not everyone has a hearty dinner to share with their family, not everyone has a family to share it with. Every year someone brings this up but you don’t realize how serious it is until you actually sit down and think about it. This year challenge yourself to let anyone in your life you’re thankful for them and they mean something to you while you can. Happy holidays and drive safe!

Link

Check Out the Blog Everywhere!

make sure to check out the blog here on wordpress (which you obviously are) or facebook, twitter, or even reddit (still under construction). This video was created with Vine. Make sure to check it out, it’s a pretty sweet video sharing app for smart phones!

From One Form of Social Media to Another

Hello WordPress world! In order to expand and acquire more followers on all of my media platforms I decided to go ahead and create a subreddit on the website Reddit.

Reddit, for those who may not know, is a bulletin-board based website where use post content searching for upvotes (showing that the content is interesting or popular) and avoiding downvotes (showing that content is in the wrong place or not cool). Upvotes can be compared to “likes” on facebook. Once the content is posted it open for whoever has access to it to comment on it and then discuss the content.A subreddit is a small community based around a general topic whether it be cute pictures of baby animals, music, world news, or to the weird topics like pictures of birds with arms or pictures of sock puppets dressed up like Hitler. Reddit can get very, very weird but the community and traffic it gets is very high. Personally I browse Reddit while I’m eating breakfast, in class, in between classes, and basically whenever I have a free chance that I get. Reddit gets approximately “2.5 billion page views per month” (FrogDog).

Since I’m quite the fan of Reddit I decided to go ahead and make a subreddit based off the content of this blog along with the twitter and facebook pages that go along with this blog. The subreddit will be a melting pot for all of the information that has anything to do with this blog, a one stop shop. The blog’s subreddit can be found at /r/ExperWSocMedia, I’m currently in the process of formatting it to look nice so if it doesn’t look pleasing I’m sorry. Soon it’ll be up and pretty!

Also I showed this blog to my baseball team while we were all in the library doing study hall and they gave me some things I should fix and work on. So you may be seeing some changes to the appearance of this blog. Hopefully it’ll make it run and look more professional!

Have you ever heard of reddit? If you use it what’s one of your favorite subreddits? How can I make it look nicer? I’ll take any other suggestions, I take criticism really well!

Works Cited

“Reddit: What Businesses Should Know.” Marketing Strategy: Communications Strategy: Business Strategy: FrogDog: Article:. FrogDog, n.d. Web.

Civil Disobedience and the Internet

The internet has become a very important tool in today’s modern world. Almost everyone in the world has access to it and with that access they can be up to date with everything happening in the world and on the internet. Someone can check Facebook between classes and check twitter while stuck in traffic and check their email while walking into work all just to see what’s happening in the world. With everything on the go with mobile phones and laptops, the power of the World Wide Web is at the tip of your fingers which can be very essential if someone is very connected to the internet.  By being connected to the internet someone can see, or even be a part of, trends and movements that come and go, that other people who don’t use the internet as much.  When these trends or movements end up becoming national news, then people can feel like they’ve actually done something. I’m not talking about stupid trends like saying “YOLO” before doing something dumb just as an excuse. But something with more meaning behind it like the Occupy Wall Street campaign or even the explosion of WikiLeaks. These are acts of civil disobedience that without out the help of the internet wouldn’t have grown to the proportions that they did.

images of the Occupy movement at different locations around the                                                                     country

I first heard about the Occupy Wall Street campaign I was in my 11^th grade English class and my teacher at the time was pretty much a hippy and we followed it for a couple of weeks. Basically, the main purpose of the whole Occupy Wall Street movement is about ending the vicious cycle of corporate influence on politics. See, the big companies make lots of money and there are a lot of little rules and regulations they have to follow. But what they can do is take the money they make, give lots of it to politicians, and then the politicians change the rules so the companies make even more money. Then the companies pay the politicians again to change the rules some more and make more money. Without the internet, it wouldn’t of been half as successful as it was. At the time, literally everyone and their mom was talking about the movement and everything that was happening in it. The media, newspapers, commentators, and you and I were all talking about it as it was happening, whether you agreed with Occupy Wall Street and its goals, the fact that it was the biggest news story in America was exactly what they wanted. It was the fuel to their fire, with more people hearing about it there were also more people joining their movement. People were posting statuses and tweet saying “Occupy [insert city near them]”. Everyone was talking about it, both in person and all over the internet.

the Occupy Wallstreet poster, featuring the Charging Bull

Wikileaks got to me about a year or so later, I was sitting in my Psychology class and my teacher brought it up to the class and briefly explained it. It is a place on the internet for people who know secrets to tell those secrets to the world without getting in trouble themselves. Sometimes the secrets can get people in trouble. Wikileaks allows those people to tell teir secrets to anyone that wants to hear, without anyone knowing it was them. The biggest case of this was from a man named Julian Assange who put some very confidential government information on the site and ended up getting in a lot of trouble. When this was all slowly bubbling to the surface with new information coming out every day, everyone and their mother was putting something on Facebook trying to be Fox News or CNN with spreading the news. Whether the news was correct or not, they were just posting whatever they were told just to get it and their opinion out on the internet for all of their friends to see it. Social media lets us do this with much ease like we never could before.

the WikiLeaks logo

The internet has opened up the world to access to information that they couldn’t before and sometimes they are aiding a movement of civil disobedience. Just talking about a civil disobedient act can help them. You hear from your friend about something and you tell your friend, who tells his mom, who tells her friends and before you know it word spreads like wild fire. Social media is like pure gasoline to this wildfire, someone can post their thoughts about something so hundreds of people can see it and then a discussion can start. Have you ever unknowingly helped out a disobedient act just by posting a status or post? Do you regret it or do you like to share your thoughts and ideas of what’s happening in the world?

Works Cited

“Combination of October 2011 Global Protests” 2011, Wikipedia. Photograph. 28 October 2013

Di Modica, Arturo. “Charging Bull” 2011, Wikipedia. Photograph. 28 October 2013.

“WikiLeaks Logo” 2008, Wikipedia. Photograph. 28 October 2013.

The Good and the Bad of Social Media

Walk through the grocery store and chances are that everyone has a Facebook account. Go to a sporting event and more than likely the parents sitting on either side of you have a Facebook account. Go up and down the halls of Everett mansion and almost everyone, if not everyone, will have a Facebook account. Facebook is everywhere with everyone. Over the seven years Facebook has been around it has grown to a staggering “800 million users, the social network has taken over most aspects of our personal and professional lives, and is fast becoming the dominant communication platform of the future” (Gulati, par 1). In ways it makes our world an easier place because it’s easier to stay connected with everyone you meet. But in other ways it makes people miserable because they’re so connected with everyone they meet. It’s sort of a situation of “picking your own poison”.

Don’t get me wrong, I love the idea of Facebook. It makes it so much easier to stay connected with people instead of communicating with them each individually. For example, this past summer I went out to Chicago for 6 weeks to play baseball. Instead of having to email or call all of my family members every day I was able to post a status or create an album and put some pictures so they could all see how I was doing. For this feature it has made life incredibly easier.

On the other hand it has made some people more miserable instead of happier with the increased ability to share their life. Some people on social media websites like Facebook or Twitter abuse their freedom on the internet to share too much information or information that they shouldn’t be sharing with the internet. As a reaction to this, people they are friends with see this information and it makes them upset. I’ve been someone that’s been annoyed with someone else on the internet and I can guarantee that someone has been annoyed with me. It’s just how the internet works. It’s like hanging out with someone for a week straight; chances are you’ll get sick of them.

On the internet, there are give or take three types of people to me. There are the people who just lurk on Facebook. They’ll post very little and just read other people’s posts. Then there is the person who uses Facebook moderately to post and comment on other posts. Lastly, there are the people who over use it and post so many times a day that they write whatever they are doing every time of the day. They write all their problems and just seek to get attention through obnoxious posts. Studies show that Facebook is “associated with desirable things such as increasing social support” (Panek, par. 11). But while trying to get some support they will abuse the power of the internet and can come off as annoying and childish. They will post things that just make their friends uncomfortable. They just don’t understand what’s okay and what’s not okay to post.

Social media sites can be amazing, but in other ways they can make us miserable. I feel like at least once in a while everyone who has a Facebook or Twitter gets annoyed with some online even if it’s one of their friends. It’s just too hard to avoid. It just causes us to be miserable, maybe for a day or maybe for a year or two. It’s just how it works. Have you ever been annoyed with one of your friends online? What did they do? How often do you think that people get annoyed with you? What kind of online personality do you think you have?

Works Cited

Gulati, Daniel. “HBR Blog Network.” Harvard Business Review. N.p., n.d. Web. 07 Oct. 2013.

Panek, Elliot. “Narcissism on Social Media Tells Us a Lot About ourselves.” The Conversation. N.p., n.d. Web. 07 Oct. 2013.

Two Weeks In

So far we’ve been in class at school for about two weeks and as a blogger I’ve learned a lot! In the past two weeks a I’ve spent more time searching through blogs than I have my whole life. It’s a different world that I’m just not used to yet. Just like when I first made a Facebook or Twitter I didn’t know the etiquette or how to be “cool” on the sites. But eventually overtime I started to understand it and eventually I’ll get good at blogging. Hopefully one day my blog will get a good following.

While searching through wordpress the first blog I commented on was a hockey blog. The post itself was about a hit that another player had done the night before on another player. Supposedly it was a very dirty hit and a lot of people were really upset about it. Personally, I didn’t see the hit at all so I decided to comment on it. I said something along the lines of saying the hit wasn’t clean and that I’ve been searching for a video. Within minutes I started to get downvotes. Eventually I ended up getting 6 upvotes and 28 upvotes on my comment. People started posting comments underneath me criticizing me for not seeing the hit and there was a brief dialogue going on.

The second blog I commented on was a blog by Long Awkward Pauses. The post was called Coffee Addicts Anonymous. It was a satirical piece about an AA meeting for people addicted to coffee. I posted a comment saying that “the smell of coffee makes me nauseous” hoping that I don’t get addicted to coffee. The author had commented on everyone else’s comments so I thought I my get one. Instead someone else warned me saying that it’s a slippery slope and to be careful! At least they were nice about it!

An essay by Jonathon Franzen was then pushed our way as a class about his views on what’s wrong with the media saturated world we live in today. All I can say after reading it was wow! Franzen knows a lot of words. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that I agree with him. He used a lot of words that I didn’t necessarily know. Good for him! Realistically, I think he hit the nail right on the head with his thoughts. Our world is so consumed with social media and being cool on social media that a lot of people forget how to be themselves and more importantly human beings. Some people even shared their own opinions criticizing Franzen’s essay, one person would be Caroline Bankoff. Bankoff makes the essay much easier to read by summarizing it and bringing out his main ideas.

The internet causes us as humans to become very lazy.  We’ve become used to just searching something in Google whenever we need to remember something instead of just remembering it. Yes, the internet is a very, very helpful place. But we rely too heavily on it for too much in our lives. With the widespread infection of smart phones it’s hard to see someone without their eyes buried into their hands. He sees this in commercials on television where “half the advertisements on network television are featuring people bending over smartphones” (Guardian, par. 39). He sees that it’s spreading everywhere and he’s very true. People are just getting numb to respect and manners.

Franzen hates the world of Twitter and Facebook and Tumblr and anything that you can think of that relates to social media. People just post the stupidest things that they really don’t think about before they post them. I can see where his point is on that. He questions a future world of tweeters where people communicate in their shallow forms of social engagement eventually start making money for doing what they do and then the world turns into shallow social engagement instead of putting their words onto paper where they can write whatever they want.

The world of Twitter to him is especially dumb. He sees that it is too hard to have an argument or a good point in only 140 characters. To him it’s like writing a novel while leaving out a letter the whole time. That’s a pretty valid point. But most people don’t use twitter for that purpose really. The way I see it people generally use it to say what they’re doing and to just say something’s. Very rarely do you see arguments and discussions happening on twitter. Users have just adapted to twitter and restricted their thoughts and discussions to less than 140 characters.

Bibliography

“Jonathan Franzen: What’s Wrong with the Modern World.” The Guardian. N.p., n.d. Web. 24 Sept. 2013.

“Long Awkward Pause.” Long Awkward Pause. N.p., n.d. Web. 24 Sept. 2013.