Bigger Networks
I'm going to show my age here but when I was younger (back in my day) we did not have this crazy thing called social media. I remember going off to college in my beat up old car and in my wallet was a name and address book, so I could call and write. Now, people did have cellphones and all of that but we are talking the stone ages of 2004 and I was a poor kid from the country so I did not have a phone. After about 3 months into my freshman year of college I met a guy named Phil. Phil was a pretty cool guy, had an xbox, loved to play halo, super cool. Phil introduced me to social media. He was playing on his myspace account when I walked into the door of his dorm room one day. "Hey man what the heck is that?" He replied, "Oh this is myspace." From that point on I was hooked. I would spend hours trying to make my profile on myspace awesome and find as many people as I knew in high school. A month later another friend, Ben, showed me Facebook. Again I was hooked and this one was something I could not get rid of. I remember getting on Facebook and communicating with girls that I met at a party but did not get their number. It was my way of communicating because remember, I did not have a cell phone. I sent and received so many messages this way and connected back with all of my old friends from high school because everybody who was anybody was on Facebook. Plus, you had to have a college email so only cool people were on their.
It never really clicked until I started taking this class and doing a little reading. I have learned that Facebook saved me. I was alone and a little depressed in college my first year but because I joined Facebook I was able to communicate with people I knew from the past and people that I had just met in college. Growing my network at a time when I thought it was the thing to do helped me establish an array of people who are there at all times. Even today I still use Facebook for recommendations, keep track of family, to find old friends, and to make new ones.
I went to do a little research out of the textbook and readings and found a really good TED talk on the subject. I love using TED talks in my classroom when appropriate. The link is below and I hope you enjoy it. It is pretty interesting and gives a good explanation of the benefits of social media. It is only 12 mins so it will not take all day to watch.
P.S. Phil is still a friend of my although only online and Ben is one of my best friends. He was even in my wedding.
TED talk Cliff Lampe
It never really clicked until I started taking this class and doing a little reading. I have learned that Facebook saved me. I was alone and a little depressed in college my first year but because I joined Facebook I was able to communicate with people I knew from the past and people that I had just met in college. Growing my network at a time when I thought it was the thing to do helped me establish an array of people who are there at all times. Even today I still use Facebook for recommendations, keep track of family, to find old friends, and to make new ones.
I went to do a little research out of the textbook and readings and found a really good TED talk on the subject. I love using TED talks in my classroom when appropriate. The link is below and I hope you enjoy it. It is pretty interesting and gives a good explanation of the benefits of social media. It is only 12 mins so it will not take all day to watch.
P.S. Phil is still a friend of my although only online and Ben is one of my best friends. He was even in my wedding.
TED talk Cliff Lampe
I love reading vignettes like this, of real experiences from people who actually got to watch social media and technology flourish this century, unlike people like me, who were too young to understand much about computers when MySpace was winning the internet. Of course now, for example, I'm very familiar with Cortana as Microsoft's last-ditch effort to compete with Siri, but back in the day, I always thought of Halo and Xbox as just "things made by Windows, for big kids to play with."
ReplyDeleteSince middle school (~2008), when the literal need to be social was budding, there were already so many social media platforms that I didn't know which way to turn. I think I may have missed something crucial, since I lacked the wherewith-all to experience the inception of true social media.