During the minor of social media and social networks we learned a lot about what influence social media has on the world, people and the business sector. Lots of perspectives and new things to do have been learned. Even on this blog is there a lot information about different aspects of social media. But reading them and articles on the internet to be inspired for my last blog I thought about what kind of influence social media actually has on my life?
This is not the first time a thought about it. Once, in another course, we had to be offline for a period of 24 hours. These 24 hours thought me that I was very dependent of social media. As in: every morning when I woke up I immediately checked my social media accounts. But after thinking about it, it wasn’t even for the fear of missing out: it became a habit. And an annoying one where I keep checking and checking my Facebook even though I’m not actually reading it anymore. During this period I planned for myself that I’d stop using social media as often as I did and became more active online. Well so far so good, but the plan is still a plan.
Nowadays I stopped using Twitter because of the huge amount of sponsor related Tweets I was reading everyday. But my Facebook and Instagram accounts are still active. Why? Because I still ‘need’ it in order to communicate with friends, family and classmates. Assignments are discussed easily via Facebook where we do not even need to have each others telephone number. And for my case, during this minor, it’s actually the only way to communicate with one of the members of my groups since she doesn’t even own a phone where applications like Whatsapp can be downloaded on.
So the one important reason for me to keep continuing using social media is purely for the communication itself. I don’t post lots of statuses on Facebook and I think my Instagram is still quit empty compared to other users. Even though I do not post much myself I really like to see other peoples pictures of, for example, places I’m planning to see in the future. Or for new ideas for recipes I can make. It is still an easy access to lots of peoples ideas in comparison with Google in my opinion.
So this is also the big influence it has on my life: it made communicating with my network easier. What is the influence of social media on your life?
