Some Final Thoughts

At the beginning of this class I was overwhelmed at the thought of following 10 social media sites.  I chose 10 at random to subscribe to and I set out determined to really immerse myself in them.  The reality was that while I did immerse myself in social media, it was not necessarily in the original 10 places outlined in my journal.  As I mentioned in my last several entries I barely spent any time with LibraryThing and YouTube and did not even use GoogleTalk at all.  However, if I tally up the social media I was exposed to over the course of the semester, the total is greater than 10.  This was not something I could predict at the beginning of the semester. 

Despite exposure to a large variety of technologies, there are only a few that I view regularly.  I think that this is a function of time and of interest.  With coursework, a new baby and day-to-day responsibilities there are not endless hours to spend in the digital world.  As I result I tend to gravitate to the tools that interested me the most or that filled a need in my life.  Facebook, Weddingbells and blogs were fixtures in my life prior to this class and they continue to be now.  Skype was a new tool that I anticipate remaining in my life beyond this class.  It has proven to be a rich and meaningful way to stay in contact with my in-laws, as well as a valuable tool for collaboration.  The social media I viewed less (Twitter, LinkedIn, LibraryThing, YouTube and GoogleTalk) all seem to be a result of the fact that they don’t really fill a need in my life and therefore I did not make time for them.  My experience with Twitter reinforced this for me.  When there was something of real interest to me (the World Ringette Championships) I made time to participate on Twitter.  Now that it is over, I have dropped using completely.

I have noticed that across all of these tools, people participate to varying degrees.  There are those who update Facebook every hour of the day versus people who have Facebook profiles yet never appear to logon at all.  Of the people I follow on Twitter there are some who tweet several times a day and others who I have yet to read a tweet from.  The same is true across all the other platforms as well.  As a producer of social media I think that I fall somewhere in the middle, I participate regularly, but do not share every detail of my life.  I am comfortable with this decision and I think that should be the determining factor in how much you reveal of yourself and how much you participate in social media.  As a consumer, I also appreciate the mid-range in terms of participation.  If I am following a blog, I appreciate regular updates, yet I feel inundated if a blog is updated too often.  The same was true with Twitter.  I found myself feeling overloaded by tweets from certain people I followed.  I started skipping their updates because I was overwhelmed.  For this reason, I very much appreciated LinkedIn.  There is not nearly as much activity on this social networking site as there is on Facebook and as a result when there is activity I find myself paying much more attention.

Finally, I know that part of the purpose of this journal was to examine how people use social media and how they interact, yet my journal focused heavily on how I used them.  I found it very challenging to move outside of my own experience for this assignment.  I think this is because in a lot of cases I was using tools that were new to me and required a lot of my energy just to navigate and become familiar with. This made it difficult to move to the next stage and focus on what others were doing.  I did manage to pay more attention to what other people were doing with the tools that I was more familiar with like Facebook and Weddingbells.  I was comfortable with the tools and how they worked so I could focus on what others were doing.