Here we go...

So here we are. My first post. Now, I’ve been using social media for a while now: Facebook, Steam, Reddit, Imgur, Pintrest. I’m fairly familiar with social media. But in this class and over the course of the semester, I think I’m going to be doing things a bit different. Like I said, I’m familiar with social media, but I’ve always been a “lurker”, someone who just views the content, rather than contributes to it. That’s what’s interesting about this for me now. 

I’ve started a blog, and a Twitter account, two things that even a couple weeks ago I would never see myself doing. And so far, it’s going well. I’m going to have to learn how to actually be social on these social media sites, like we were talking about, without interaction between people, it’s just media. I think part of the reason I never engaged like everyone else did, was because I understood the rules of these sites, rules of the internet you could say. Rules for what’s popular, what gets ignored, and what get criticized. I guess I just never thought that anything I had to say or contribute would ever qualify to be popular. But, who knows? Maybe by the end of this I’ll be shooting off tweets and uploading posts to reddit and they’ll get retweets and upvotes galore. We’ll see.

On a less personal note, there was something we talked about that I’ve been thinking about. We watched a video about the inception of the telephone and national and then international phone lines. And then we watched a video about the beginning of the internet and then the web. And I started to think about how, sure, the web is about 20 something years old now. But, in a historical perspective, just becoming widespread, it’s just now become as pervasive as telephones, over the course of the last few years. And sure, as individuals, we may know how to use the internet, we’re familiar with it, but I feel that as a society, we still don’t really get it. We’re still testing it out, seeing how it works. Our society is changing, it’s going online, and we’re still figuring out how to do that. Society changed with the printing press, and then the telephone (just to name a couple), and now it’s changing with the internet. And I have no idea where it’s going. I don’t know if anyone can really know. Do we have the imagination to think of where this could go? We have access, fast, easy access, to the internet virtually everywhere we are. Where will it go next, what will it look like? I’m excited for it. But a little bit scared too.