A few weeks ago I was compelled to review my use of Facebook. My professor had prompted the class to think of the social media site that we used the most and to review the strengths and weaknesses of the site. I do not have wide variety of experiences with social media sites and of the sites that were options to review I only had used Facebook, but I have all but stopped using of Facebook. I decided to craft my response to demonstrate my frustrations with Facebook and to identify how I replaced the functions that I liked about Facebook with other sites. Here is my response to the question "Do you use Facebook?":
"No, not anymore. Of these sites I have used Facebook the most. I was out of college teaching English as a foreign language abroad, when I found out that I could use my alumni email address to sign up for a Facebook account, a moment second only, in fond technological memories, to when I was invited to get a gmail account. There where American students studying abroad in the university I worked at and they all had Facebook and showed it off and it was amazing. So much more user friendly then MySpace, which I was using at the time. Right after I signed up I started finding people who were using Facebook to connect with. My friends I grew up with, my college friends, people I was meeting traveling around, everybody was signing up for Facebook. And it was great, I could share what I was doing in my travels with all my "friends" in a way that felt so much more natural then massive group emails. But for me it all changed. It started with friending people I did not know very well, just to have more friends, and then having to come to terms with continuing the friendship or the dreaded unfriending. Next I realized that by friending my immediate family that there were things I did not want to say or have shown to them on Facebook and had to become more vigilant and proactive on my page. I stopped wanting to use Facebook after I had to reexamine every detail of my page and posts again because potential employers were scouring candidate's profiles. I just got sick of it. I signed up for Facebook too young to understand that I did not want to share "the for close friends only" aspects of my life with the world and too naive of the internet to understand that uploaded information has a way of hanging around. So I stopped really using it. I have a shell of a profile now because I do get messages from distant friends, but I am notified of messages in my email, then I compose my response in an email, briefly login to Facebook, copy, paste, send, logout.
"I have started using Instagram to fill in for the aspects of Facebook I miss, because I do love seeing pictures of the awesome lives and adventures of the amazing people I know but I joined Instagram with a better understanding of the ramifications of my decisions and better prepared to participate with the whole community in enjoyable and appropriate ways."
"No, not anymore. Of these sites I have used Facebook the most. I was out of college teaching English as a foreign language abroad, when I found out that I could use my alumni email address to sign up for a Facebook account, a moment second only, in fond technological memories, to when I was invited to get a gmail account. There where American students studying abroad in the university I worked at and they all had Facebook and showed it off and it was amazing. So much more user friendly then MySpace, which I was using at the time. Right after I signed up I started finding people who were using Facebook to connect with. My friends I grew up with, my college friends, people I was meeting traveling around, everybody was signing up for Facebook. And it was great, I could share what I was doing in my travels with all my "friends" in a way that felt so much more natural then massive group emails. But for me it all changed. It started with friending people I did not know very well, just to have more friends, and then having to come to terms with continuing the friendship or the dreaded unfriending. Next I realized that by friending my immediate family that there were things I did not want to say or have shown to them on Facebook and had to become more vigilant and proactive on my page. I stopped wanting to use Facebook after I had to reexamine every detail of my page and posts again because potential employers were scouring candidate's profiles. I just got sick of it. I signed up for Facebook too young to understand that I did not want to share "the for close friends only" aspects of my life with the world and too naive of the internet to understand that uploaded information has a way of hanging around. So I stopped really using it. I have a shell of a profile now because I do get messages from distant friends, but I am notified of messages in my email, then I compose my response in an email, briefly login to Facebook, copy, paste, send, logout.
"I have started using Instagram to fill in for the aspects of Facebook I miss, because I do love seeing pictures of the awesome lives and adventures of the amazing people I know but I joined Instagram with a better understanding of the ramifications of my decisions and better prepared to participate with the whole community in enjoyable and appropriate ways."