Social Media Interview

An interview with John Roumeliotis, a journalist student at Panteio University of Athens.

Let’s check a short interview of a student journalist. How a man of this age uses social media? How much time does he spend? What’s his social image?

1.Tell us some things about you? Help our readers get to know you a little bit!

My name is John and I am 21 years old. I study journalism at Panteio University.

2. So, how much time do you spend on social media?

I would say that I spend a lot of time on social media. Approximately 6–8 hours every day.

3. Do you see any changes in the way you use social media now, than you did when your first started using them?

Of course, when I started using the social media I did it mostly to communicate with other people. But now I use them for many things such as stay up to date with news, share my opinions and stay in touch with my friends.

3. Tell me a little bit about your mobile apps that you use. And how do you do that?

I use the same apps that all my peers do. I mean facebook, snapchat and instagram. Moreover, my mobile help me with my job, so imagine that there are apps of recording or edit the sound of an interview. Finaly, I am a big fan of athletism and I bet online, so I use apps of live scoring.

4. Society & Social media, could you define the relationship between these two?

Society and social media interact with each other. Social media are so popular nowadays that they have a great in impact in many areas of our lives. The opinion of many people is influenced by social media and opinion leaders are using social media as a tool to influence people.

5. Could elaborate a little bit on themes like friendship within the context of social media?

Social media has changed the human relationships. Friendship is affected by social media in many ways. With social media we believe that we know people better than we really do. Also, there is no real communication between people.

6. What’s your opinion about people who use their mobile phones when they are gathering with friends? For example in a cafeteria, a party or something like that.

As I said, there is no real communication between people. I don’t say that I don’t open my mobile when I am with my friends, but I don’t do it regurarly. I think there is time of using ours mobiles, but we need to avoid it when we are out, drinking cooffee or have a good company.

7. Do you use social media through your mobile phone, mostly, or a computer? If yes, tell me a little bit about it — Is it comfortable? If no, could you imagine do that?

I use both of them. There are things that you can do only on the computer. Well, to be more clear, as you said it’s not comfortable to do some things with your mobile. So both are useful to me.

8. What is your opinion of other people using social media?

Social media users have highly increased in the past years. This has resulted in different kind of people using social media. This is a good thing because a lot of opinions can be heard.

9. The rise of Social Media and generally the digital growth has given rise to new business methods like collaborative consumption. Are you familiar with that concept?

To be honest no. I’ ve heard about it but I don’t know the hole meaning of this term.

After a minute of explaining…

10. Do you consider this concept good for the traditional market?

As far as I try to understand the meaning of it, I can’t decide if colloborative consumption is good or bad. But I suppose that it affects traditional market in some way. It’s difficult for me to ansewr on something I don’t know.

11. Studying in a field like ours do you see yourself working in any collaborative consumption oriented kind of business?

I don’t think so. I don’t find collaborative conscumption so interesting. I love journalism so much, that I can’t consider myself of doing something else at all.

12. Closing our interview is there something that you would like to point out? Something in particular that you would like people to keep from this interview?

Yes of course. Firstly, I think that I use social media in moderation. I don’t let them affect on me and I believe that I’ m a good user. Secondly, I will try to learn more about collaborative consumption and having a complete aspect about this matter.

To sum up, a journalist student like John uses social media in order to get information about the world or in general about his field. We observe that he spends a lot of time on using them. Then we can see that social media are so important for him and his colleagues. Finally, we could infer that in our days we really can’t live without new technologies.

Interview by John Katsafados