While reading this article, I wasn’t as surprised or disgusted in the ways that different social media companies use to hook us as what I thought I would be.  I’ve always felt that constantly being on your phone or laptop probably wasn’t the healthiest, but at the same time I feel as though we don’t have any other choice; this has made me pretty numb to all of the crazy things that come out against social media apps or smart phones in general.

I don’t necessarily agree that apps should be trying to make us become addicted to their products, but every marketer is essentially doing the same thing.  Fast food, cigarettes, and now social media  markets all want their products to be used by the largest population that they can reach, but so do organic food distributors.  All markets are going to sell their products in ways that appeal to the buyer; they all make the buyer feel as though they want more or can’t live without their product, and this manipulation shouldn’t be acceptable to anyone, no matter what the product is.

I haven’t experienced manipulation by social media firsthand, but I have definitely seen the negatives that staring at a screen can have on someone.  I’m constantly checking my phone, whether its for snapchat, Instagram, or anything else; I’m pretty much always on my phone, but I don’t feel as though there’s a way for me to just decide to quit using my phone or social media.  When social media becomes the only way that you have to keep up to date on school, work, and friends, you don’t have much of a choice other than to constantly check your phone.  I suffer from migraines, and they’re often triggered by extended amounts of time of my laptop (writing papers is the worst), but I’ve never thought, “I can just not use my laptop or phone, and all of my problems will go away!” because of how much society has changed to depend on the use of social media.

I realize I’m quite a few days late for submitting this. While I did interview my friend early last week, I had been so busy studying for midterms that I had gotten behind in homework. Better late than never, I suppose.

When we began to talk about this assignment in class I had already picked out the perfect person to interview. I chose this individual because – in my mind – she’s highly addicted to social media. She is constantly updating her feeds and checking her notifications. Whether we are out eating, watching a movie, or even at a concert, she is on her phone checking to see how many ‘likes’ she is getting on her Tweets and Instagram posts. I learned a great deal about her social media usage during this interview, and I can without a doubt say that her use of social media is much different than mine.

After going through the questions with her, I learned that she checks her accounts constantly. She checks them when she wakes up, as she’s walking to class, once class gets out, as she’s eating lunch, etc. In her mind she doesn’t believe that she has a problem. She thinks her use of social media is average. After we continued to go through the questions, I learned something very interesting. Apparently my friend has four Instagram accounts. She has her main account, a ‘finsta’, an account made to follow famous people, and then an account for herself. I was so confused by this. Her main account and finsta account I understood. It was the other two accounts that confused me. Her third account has no other purpose than following famous people. The reason she has this account is because it helps with her ratio of Followers:Following. Since famous people aren’t going to follow her back, she doesn’t want to follow them on her main account. She would rather keep her ‘following’ low and make her ‘followers’ seem higher. Her fourth account was basically used as a photo album. She posted as many pictures as she wanted and she had the layout very carefully designed to look as nice as it possibly could have. This account was something that was for her eyes only. She was on private, so no one could follow her and she didn’t follow anyone. It was made for the sole purpose of creating a type of art in a sense. After talking through it with her, I did begin to understand her reasoning behind why she had four accounts, but I will still in shock.

We moved on to the subject of privacy. She has her main Instagram account on private, but her Twitter account left on public. This isn’t because she is worried about people seeing what she is posting. This is more of a strategy for her to gain more and more followers. With Instagram, in order for people to see her photos they need to follow her. So she explained that if she is on private, people will be more inclined to follow her because they will want to be able and look at her posts. If she was on public, anyone could come in and scroll through her pictures without following her. She does this in order to gain more followers. With Twitter however, it’s different due to one feature – the retweet. On Twitter if you’re private, no one is able to retweet your tweets. They are only able to ‘like’ them. In order to reach as many people possible and get the most feedback on a tweet, you need people to be able to see it. Therefore, she has her account on public so that way her followers can retweet her tweets and share them with their followers. This is a strategy she uses in order to get to most interaction as she possibly can. While I understand why she does this, I don’t understand why she worries and puts so much effort towards this. I feel as if she is putting too much thought into something that was made to be simplistic.

After interviewing my friend, it was clear to me that not everyone uses social media the same. While I simply check once or twice a day now, and don’t put all that much thought into my posts, she spends her entire day on social media. She spends her free time creating posts and tweets that she thinks would get the best interaction. While I would call her use an addiction, she sees it as nothing more than average.

I decided to interview my mom for my mini-interview because of how her use of social media differs from mine. Even though my mom uses Facebook and Instagram, she uses them for very different purposes than I do. I think that a lot of people think that if you use any social media, for example Facebook, you use it the same way everyone else does, but after this interview I figured out that assumption is far from the truth. I use Facebook for the purpose of keeping up with my friends and posting pictures in order for people to keep up with my life, but my mom uses it for those reasons and more. Yes, my mom uses it to keep up with her friends now and her friends from high school and college, but she also uses it to keep up to speed on news stories, to communicate with her friend who lives overseas, and to find new recipes to make. By “liking” certain pages like Fox News, CNN and Food Network, my mom is able to gain information that she otherwise would not have as easy access to. I use Instagram to again keep up with my friends and post pictures, and my mom mentioned that she uses it for those purposes too, but in addition she also uses Instagram to follow fashion blogs in order to make shopping easier. In Atlanta, going to the mall has gotten pretty dangerous and many people won’t go alone, because of that my mom pretty much only shops at boutiques, which means she doesn’t get to see the fashion of the big department stores. By following fashion blogs, my mom is able to see what is in style and can easily buy items that the bloggers post online, taking away having to go to any store to buy them.

I decided to interview my sister because she is similar in age to me but we have totally different personalities, so I was curious to see if that could cause us to have different social media habits.

She started off by telling me her favorite social media platforms are Instagram and Snapchat which is very similar to me, as those are the only two I use daily. I soon realized that we have similarities and differences in our social media habits. For example, we both check Instagram daily but rarely post. However, my idea of rarely posting is once a month and her’s is about four times a year. We both use Snapchat to keep in contact with people, but I use it more for friends and she uses it more for family. We both agreed that we find ourselves using social media more when we’re bored.

We differ mostly in that she is willing to give up social media and I am not. For Lent, she gives up social media and will randomly decide to get off social media for a time. I, however, really wouldn’t know what to do if I didn’t have social media to turn to during my times of boredom.  She is also very picky about who she lets follow her, where as I will let someone follow me as long as I have heard of them or they are a friend of a friend.

This probe was an interesting one because it was cool to look at someone else’s social media habits and compare them to your’s. It gave me a chance to reflect on my habits and see if I could improve or change the way I use social media in any way.

I decided to interview my mom about the way she uses social media because I know that our uses are much different. She has had a facebook for years to keep up with her friends, but she hardly ever posts. Now that me and my brother are in college, her main use of facebook is to scroll through her timeline looking for pictures that we are tagged in and saving them to her camera roll. My brother and I always get mad at her because she will “like” every picture we are tagged in even when its been posted by one of our friends that she doesn’t even know.

Her new source of social media is Instagram. She said that she joined instagram because all of her friends have it, and all of me and my brother’s friends have it, and she wants to keep up with everyone. The only times she will post is when I pick out the picture, the edit, and the caption and post it for her. My mom says she has no idea how to operate the app and leaves up to me to post, because she wants her friends and family to see what she is up to. She is still the classic mom that tries to “zoom in” when I show her a picture on instagram, even though I tell her every time that that isn’t possible.

Social media is very different for different ages. For example, my mom says she will check her social media once or maybe twice a day, usually before she goes to bed, as opposed to me, who checks my social media probably 100 times a day.

I interviewed a friend from my hall about her use of social media. I know she uses different platforms for different purposes, and figured that interviewing her would be fitting for this assignment. She utilizes Facebook, Tumblr, Instagram, and Snapchat the most. I use Instagram and Snapchat as well, but don’t have a Facebook and haven’t updated my Tumblr blog in over two years. She mainly commented on how social media has impacted her life and why she uses it in the first place. Her comment that stood out to me the most was when she said that she quickly loses interest in social media because she often feels as if she can’t “live up” to other people’s lifestyles. As a result, she takes long breaks from her social media after she loses this interest. For example, she just recently posted her first picture on Instagram in over a year, whereas I’ve posted many more within this past year.

I found her feeling very interesting, as I’ve never felt this way when using social media, but can definitely understand where she was coming from. My friend also commented on how her social media habits have changed since coming to college, as she tends to use snapchat a lot more frequently. I tend to use snapchat more as well, since it’s a fast and easy way to communicate with new friends. She also commented that she is pretty exclusive in who she lets follow her, since she keeps her accounts on private or only accepts certain friend requests on Facebook or Snapchat. This made me reflect on my own social media accounts, as I keep mine pretty public to the world. However, her input made me consider changing this.

My friend is a freshman and we both went to high school together. She stated that her social media usage is daily and she has opened up her various social media apps “too many times to count”. When asked when she felt she opened her apps up she said she found herself opening them up when she was in an awkward situation, before bed, and when she woke up and whenever in between. She doesn’t post often but it does depend on the social media. Posts more on snapchat than face book because she uses facebook to merely scroll and doesn’t really contribute to it while on snapchat she’s more active. She uses snapchat the most, uses Instagram, and facebook. She said that she used all her social media accounts for entertainment purposes. However, she uses facebook to follow current events as she follows a lot of the new channels on there. She uses her phone the most and then her laptop.

When she went through her follower/friends list she found that she interacted the most with her friends and family on facebook while her friends on snapchat were people she that she was friends with personally meaning Snapchat was more of a private social media platform while on facebook it’s people that she knows or mutual friends. All of her social media is on private so that no one except the people that she adds can see her activities. She’s not worried about her social media postings currently, as they are very rare, but she’s pretty embarrassed about her posts from way back in 6th grade. She watches the advertisements of brands but doesn’t directly interact with them unless there are any sales or specific events that a certain brand that she is interested in is promoting. She has noticed the political advertisements as well as makeup advertisements as well as short ads by talk shows about different current events and as programmed by different browsers she has noticed advertisements for things that she has googled or shown interest in from her searches. My friend also mentioned that she used to be really big on social media usage as we all were when we first got facebook but as she got older and entered high school and now in college she has greatly limited her social media usage. She is now aware of how not private her posts are due to the current vulnerable technology so she is constantly wary of what she shares, likes, or searches.

I decided to interview my roommate about his social media habits and preferences. We both have similar morals and beliefs so I was curious to see how this translated to the world of media.

My roommate Kyle and I are both very down to Earth people, who also enjoy engaging in personal relationships based on real interaction rather than relationships based upon media interaction. Kyle uses social media daily, typically in between classes to pass the time. This is similar to my trends of social media, but different than the social norm. Interestingly, he only uses snapchat; meaning no twitter, Instagram, Facebook, vine, or bleacher report. I asked him why he doesn’t use these forms of social media and the response I got was rather intriguing. He told me that these apps were not merely social media, they embodied comparative media. This meaning that Instagram and Facebook have the hidden influence of making the user compare their lives to their friends and followers. Both me and Kyle agree that comparison is a negative and unhealthy style of living, and that by avoiding these forms of media, it helps to minimize comparison. Kyle also told me that those types of media will not benefit him in any practical way and will only distract him.

He told me that he likes snapchat for a few reasons. One being it is a way for him to communicate with friends in a very informal manner. He said that he can keep in touch with old and new friends experiences much easier through it. This allows him to be constantly relate able to them in real life conversation. Another aspect that he enjoys about snapchat is the humorous side of it; snapstories provide him with comical relief throughout the day.  The only thing that he doesn’t like about snapchat is that sometimes he feels obligated to keep up with streaks, or to post a snapstory at a fun event just for social recognition.

Kyle knows 100% of his friends on snapchat in real life which suggests he is very selective when adding friends. He would be potentially concerned about authoritative figures being on his snapchat friends list, because as he stated, he has “no filter” on snapchat. Kyle also outlined how is overall social media useage has been on a downward trend over the years. He used to be a regular user of iFunny and Facebook years ago, but realized that those just wasted his productive and free times.

Overall, Kyle and I have similar opinions regarding social media; It is very excessive and potentially harmful, but it can be worthwhile if used in limited capacities. He just takes his social media interaction one step past mine, and only uses snapchat. This however is very very different from the trajectory of today’s society. In America, a social media epidemic is practically occurring, with kids in elementary school beginning to discover the world of social media. Kyle and I see more to life than that.