I have previously written about what it is like to be a GenY teacher and the accompanying labels and stigmas (you can read about it here). This time I want to look at the idea of people growing up in social media. The following extends from the recent writting of an assignment and is observational and reflective in nature. Ok really it is about me and my experiences with social media.
One of the earliest social media platforms was Blogger, blogging websites, a place for generating infromation, Blogger was launched in 1999. When did you first hear about blogging? Well I have vague memories of people talking about it in high school during the mid ’00s but did not experience it until starting my MEd (TL) in 2019. This was viewed initially as a daunting task, but I feel I have come a long way since then.
The mid ’00s were filled with the creation and launching of many social media platforms, the popular choic at my school was MySpace. I never had one, didn’t see the point and I was not allowed to have an account, to be honest we were still working with dial up internet that even by the time I was trying to complete assingments in Year 11 was sketchy at best. Friends loved Myspace, whilst I was still using the email address I had set up in year 6 and spelt incorrectly. By the end of High School Twitter had become popular. Not long after the launch of Myspace, Facebook was launched, I did not hear about it until 2008, no longer in high school and part way through my first year of university and this becomes a place of fun and games, sharing some really horrible statuses that reveal very little about anything. Games launched on Facebook become the thing to do whilst connected to the ethernet and fase in of a glitchy wifi system. Favourite game: Geo Challenge (sadly no longer operating). Farmville and My Zoo also do the rounds of obsessive Uni students waking up at sill times to harvest their crops. Facebook allows for us to communicate via messenger regularly across the vast distances and share information.
I had a linkedin account, logged in once I think. Never used it in an effective manner. Might have missed an opportunity to link with colleagues but you know what only one person ever mentioned it.
We then have the ongoing changing social media world. Google gains many sites, whilst competitors hold out and gain their own followings. Instagram, photo stories, become more and more popular.
We are now at the point that we now have people making a living off being social media “Influencers” publishing opinions on a variety of platforms. We can see people grow and change via social media. Pictures and statuses are brought up as memories, even my own children have a presence on social media through images (no they don’t have accounts they are too young for that) shared by our families to show each other what is happening in their lives when we are all seperated by distance and circumstance. Our creations of networks now extends into the online world. Good or bad? Either way we live in two locations with varying amounts of attentiveness to each.
The Real Life and The Online worlds