Letter from the Future…
Oh man this post is going to be full of run on sentences and thought provoking questions… it’s going to be great!
The first major social network I signed up for would have to be MSN… Does that count? I mean it was social media in the sense that it connect you with people you know and you had the ability to post statuses and nudge people and post pictures and all that fun stuff. Good times… good times… No but really, the first major social media network I signed up for was Facebook. I remember when I first dipped my toes into the digital world of Social Media and the person I was. I was a chubby socially awkward teenager that had trouble sparking up conversations with people. At the time, I had no clue the significance of having a Facebook account or even the importance of Social Media. With Facebook, I was able to peek into people’s lives, learning more and more about the people I saw everyday without explicitly asking them. For example, I remember when i had a crush on a girl from school, I would look up her profile and read her about page to see if she was single or in a relationship. At the time, going social about your relationship was a huge deal. If you were a couple at school, you were Bradgelina online. If you had a significant other, you were the shit on Facebook. Me, the single chubby awkward kid was nothing but a ghost or a lurker. I didn’t post much and if I did, no one would notice. It wasn’t until I started to make more friends in school, that I began to become visible. I was being tagged in more and more ridiculous inside joke statuses and pictures of fun youth days. Looking back now makes me kind of scared as to who I would be today if I didn’t have social media. With Facebook I was able to start conversations with people I was too shy to speak to at school which opened the door for me in terms of feeling accepted. I’m not saying social media saved my life or anything, because it didn’t. It served as a magnifier for my personality. More and more people would see that I was a cool guy because I was doing fun stuff and posting about it on Facebook. Because of this, I am grateful for social media, as bad as it can be, it really allows for people to say what they couldn’t in real life. This raises the question of how many kids today feel invisible? Like a ghost in this new digital world.
Throughout the term and course, I have learned many insightful things. Things that I wish my younger self would have learned about sooner. Thanks to #RTA902 I get to look back in retrospect and talk to my younger self and tell him what I have learned through my time in this course… Here it goes!
Dear Younger Me,
How are you? How are the kids? Hahaha funny right? Older version of you still got it! Anyways, I’m writing to you to inform you the social media is alot more important than you think. In the future or where I’m from, people get paid to have a Facebook account! What? Crazy? I know right?
We as the human race have found this interconnection between the physical and digital. We are all in one way or another, robots. I can’t really tell if that’s a cool or scary thing. Yeah we live these programmed lives that we have and report and check into these large scale networks in order to keep our existence relevant. This is both a good and bad thing, depends how you look at it. I have my days where I understand how social media provides us with a platform to share and explore experiences with other people all around the world but I also have my days where I find it hard to socialize with anyone. Maybe I’m going through one of those mid life crisis now at age 20 but y’know what, that’s the result of existing in this digital world. Everything just goes and does not stop for anyone. You may not post your picture of your vacation to Singapore(which was fantastic!) but someone else will and they will get all of the attention. That doesn’t really matter now but I understand to you at your age it did matter. It mattered being accepted and liked by everyone. My advice to you is, don’t fall behind. Social media is a great way to connect and share, so use it! Use it to change the world or something! Or get rich! Use it because otherwise it’ll use you. You will become just a number or profile, empty without any substance or character. Use social media as your sheet of paper and yourself as a pencil and draw whatever the hell you want! Enjoy and have fun because I hate to say it kiddo but not everyone will like you. So it just makes the most sense to be yourself and show others how awesome you are, the people who like you will stay and connect and those who don’t… they will.. well… fuck off!
Sincerely,
Your Future Self
P.S I AM BATMAN
