Perks

April 5th, the final day of blogs. Wow, has this semester ever gone by quickly. I felt it appropriate to leave my last blog for the final day, just as a nice way to end this experience. That’s not to say I won’t continue blogging – this assignment has opened my mind to so many new and different ideas on citizen media and social networking. If I scroll down to my first post back in January, I can see how close-minded I was to the idea of blogging. I genuinely thought it was an illegitimate version of pseudo-journalism. I thought wrong. The following are the rest of my experiences with social media and citizen journalism in a nutshell from this past semester:

I experienced some interesting things on my Youtube channel where I watched the popularity of one of my videos skyrocket. The power of social media caught me completely off guard.
I worried about my “Google Juice” when applying to jobs online, wondering if prospective employers would search my name and find out that I once rode away with an alien in my bicycle’s basket.
I began to work on my final project for the course, working through dilemmas and finally presenting a mash-up remix that I then uploaded to Youtube for all of you, and the world, to see and comment back on.
Then the world stopped when my Playstation 3 wouldn’t play any games. Without thinking, I found myself hunting for clues on the Internet, realizing how important and useful the Internet and social media sites such as forums truly are.
A classmate annoyed me and made me question when social media and things like cellphones and MSN are appropriate?
And then I came across a website that showed me how social media and Web 2.0 could be so much better if it all focused around me, and not them.

As you can see, all of these experiences, all of these blog posts were about how social media and our course discussions and topics effected my personal life. How I perceived things and how I interacted with the digital world around me. This was my goal.

I also had a goal not to write some boring, unenthusiastic blog posts filled with theoretical knowledge that I pulled out of my…course readings…but about the practical nature of social media around me. I want my readers to be entertained every time they stumble upon my blog, smiling as they read, and knowing that I care about what I'm writing about. I think the worst thing is reading someone's blog and being able to tell how uninspired they are about the subject matter.

I want my readers to be able to relate to what I have to say, because ultimately, this isn’t just about my practical experiences with social media – we are all experiencing the same things these days. Twitter, Facebook, Youtube – it’s difficult to go through a day without seeing or hearing these names. Cellphone videos submitted by pedestrians, opinionated blogs, online polls - these things have become common place, at a frighteningly fast pace.

Social media permeates our existence today. It’s everywhere and it’s all around us. We are all experts on it, even though we might not know it. Perhaps that’s why it’s been so easy and fun for me to write about these things. They interest me. They’re topical. They’re relevant. And I guess it’s always fun to write about something you know so well.

I tell people that one of my assignments for a course is to maintain a blog having to do with social media, and in response I’m told how lucky I am, how fun that sounds, how they wish they could do something as entertaining as that for school work.

My response?

"I guess those are just the Perks of Being a Comm. Student"


"I have decided that maybe I want to write when I grow up. I just don't know what I would write." ~ Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower