Personal Patterns in Social Media Interaction

At first impression, I figured this project would simply highlight the distinct pattern of social media activity in which I already knew about pretty well. In the end, I noticed my habits of connectivity trace back to a multitude of different stimuli — surfacing both as strategically useful and indirectly harmful. Outlining both sides truly aids in understanding the massive technological revolution and how it has affected social networking, personable relationship building, and even coping mechanisms. Each of these categories subsequently relate to news gathering. First hand encounters of this revolution were inevitable throughout this project, for I just needed to pay attention to my habits over a span of a week in order to make the connections and realizations that I absorbed by the end.

For starters, networking is a major part of finding financial success on a business level, and a provider of emotional and social support on a personal level. In my mind, those factors alone set the reasons I have always strongly affiliated myself within the online world. As a musician, I have a long history of uploading, communicating, and promoting my talent. The platforms range through YouTube, Facebook, Sound Cloud, Twitter, Instagram, and sometimes Snapchat. However, over the years I have uploaded a lot less frequently, and promoting my music has diminished from a local and global outreach, to mostly just a local-based network. I noticed this by Tuesday — the second day into my note-taking — for I was on my 3-hour break in-between classes, and I usually spend this time in the school library at a desktop doing homework or online looking through all the social media sites to get up to speed on news: local, global, or simply the news of friends and family. In midst of working on a Biology assignment, I open a new tab in my browser and check out the new comments or messages on my YouTube channel, responding to many of them — but not all. One of the messages I received was from a fan submitting a request for me to attempt an Ed Sheeran cover. Curiosity won me over, so I made a simple Google search of the song to give it a listen. One of the top three results actually led me to an article pertaining to Ed Sheeran announcing himself as the first performance on the revival of MTV’s program, TRL. This, was in fact news to me — not because I follow Ed Sheeran — but because I used to be an avid viewer of TRL between the years of 2005 and 2008 when it was still originally on air. The fact that this news spread to me in a totally indirect way, posed as a very useful facet of news-spreading through social networking. However, this positive portal of receiving and discovering information is not always concretely favorable.

Building and maintaining personal relationships embodies, arguably, the strongest advantage of social media. Social ties provide us with a seemingly infinite web of connections that exert information in each and every direction. Addition of online platforms and mobile devices reduces the time for the spread of communication. The morning after checking up on YouTube and discovering the news of a beloved television show reboot, I woke in my bed, lazily fumbled one hand towards my bedside table, managed to grasp my cell phone just in time for my eyes to register the bright screen before I view anything else. Continuing to lay in bed for the added fifteen minutes, I instantly open Instagram and view the ‘stories’ my friends posted the night before. I realize that the first news source that I am drawn to is the updates with my peers. In comparison to the rest of Americans, this is not an unusual behavior. According to Pew Research Center’s study on how Americans encounter and participate digital news, they found that a majority of follow-up actions and easily solidified attention or interest was based around family and friends communicating online.

While this trend is useful in the sense that discussion, bonding, and learning follows through sharing news with close acquaintences. However, many times the relationships we have are with like-minded people, so your news sources become even narrower than before. We also tend to trust the people we are close with, so investigating the source becomes even less common through this type of sharing. Furthermore, it seems as the personal or individual news (i.e. the selfies at a restaurant, the long confession or rant posts, or the videos of how “lit” the party is) seems to be the type we update ourselves on far more often than major news stories. Personally, I have noticed this pattern throughout my own observations over the week. This realization struck me on each site — social media platforms all provide some news port, so I noticed how filtered my information was on each website. Bubbles, in accordance with specific social sites, are not mutually exclusive concepts. They will continue to coexist and I realized the way I utilize their relationship is something I indirectly like and take advantage of as an online user. Scrolling through Instagram to skip CNN or other news posting and head straight to silly memes instead is a function I actively take on because it appeals more to my interest in many cases. This idea exists through the workings of both technological protocol in marketing, advertisement, and search engine companies, aided with the innate neurological pathways that filter naturally.

Another interesting — yet scary — behavior I noticed going hand-in-hand with the brain’s hardwiring, reveals an adapting, unconventional route with coping mechanisms. Whether it be seeing friends change profile pictures to “Pray for Paris” amongst many other social disasters, or commenting on a status explaining a close pal’s mourning over a death in the family — social media has given our culture another way to cope. As social creatures, we need reinforcement of others. An online platform makes all other cases of grieving and support draw attention quickly. However, I also noticed that I cope in physical, human interactions with my mobile device and the content on it. Sitting in my car before entering work, I filed through articles off of The Onion to get a good laugh and an even better distraction. I was about to march into my office and demand the bonus that supervisors had failed to hold their word to. Instead of getting out of my car right away to deal with the anger and nervous butterflies that flooded my whole being, I sat and looked for another story to take my mind off the uncertainty I had in my approach. I see this all the time — sitting in Starbucks on a coffee date, and the nerves relocate your attention to your phone, just in hopes to find a bit of information that can fill in for the awkward silence. This became a very eye-opening revelation as I noticed it. I’ve grown up in a climate that accepts this and exploits it. Technically, it is useful, but how indirectly damaging can it be?

Although I came out of this project with plenty new insights involving networking, social skills, and emotional management, I feel as though I am left with more questions and curiosities that will keep me hyper-sensitive to my own behavior and of those around me as well. Positives and negatives are a natural, unavoidable law of life. The effective usability of social media as news inevitably pairs with indirect harm of having such a powerful tool at our fingertips. Awareness remains a key factor in maneuvering around the usages to get the best experience out of a technological adavancement that can be an absolutely lovely experience.