This class wasn’t on the top of my list when choosing an FYOS, but I ended up enjoying the class overall. I see myself using the information I’ve learned from this course in the future. Wherever I may end up career wise, I know that what I learned in this class will help – even if just a little bit. I think that the class was set up well. The discussion-based classroom was a good way to get your mind thinking. Overall there isn’t much I would change. My only issue was the Sunday deadlines conflicting with work, but that’s more of a personal thing. Other than that, this class has been a good addition to my Mondays.

After jumping around from major to major these past four months, I’ve realized that I have no idea what my major should be. So I’m currently resting with an undecided-business major. However, I do know where I see myself going in life. I’d like to work my way up in the music industry – whether it be in management or relations. One of my dream jobs would be to work for Billboard Headquarters in New York, either writing articles or managing the several social media accounts that they run.

Social media has drastically changed the music industry. Companies like Billboard use their platform to constantly and almost instantly keep their audience up to date on all of the latest news. They post several times a day and these postings range from album debuts, song ratings, and celebrity news. This type of platform keeps me knowledgable on almost everything music related. It keeps me informed on what is going on in the industry. It’s much more than just pop-culture.

Without social media, the music industry would not be where it is today. When artists broadcast their latest music on social media, it creates greater sales. If artists were to not post about their upcoming music, it would be less talked about and result in fewer sales. Social media has helped create the music industry that we know and love today.

CITE: https://socialmediaweek.org/blog/2015/08/social-mobile-changed-music/

Apologies for yet another late posting, my weekends are always very chaotic with work.

I chose to record my media usage on Thursday and Saturday. The results were nothing out of the ordinary. I didn’t expect them to be much different. I don’t have classes on Thursday, so you would think I would be spending most of my free time focusing on media, but that wasn’t the case really. I checked social media when I woke up around 11 for about thirty minutes. I didn’t have any school work to do so I wasn’t having to read any media at all throughout the entire day. I spend the majority of my time with friends so the only time I really am using media is when I am posting a snapchat story. I posted three on Thursday and they were all related to what I was doing with my friends at the time. We did listen to the radio to and from dinner, but other than that I didn’t use media again until I got back into my dorm. That is when I got on my phone and checked all of the basics (twitter, instagram, facebook, and snapchat) for nearly 2 hours. So while that is a little absurd, I’d like to say my lack of media throughout the day made up for it.

Saturday I worked a double shift at Red Lobster so I had zero time to actually use media in any sense. I checked my social media for a few minutes before work and then I checked them again after work for about an hour. While I was at work I didn’t check my phone once. I went nearly ten hours without checking it. That’s how my weekends usually go unless there is a football game or concert. I am just too busy to put time towards that.

Throughout both of these days there was one media that I failed to log, but know that I used VERY frequently. That was recorded music. I listen to music at all times of the day no matter where I am – even at work. I’ve learned the lyrics to nearly every song that comes on at Red Lobster now because of how often I’m there. Music is a media that plays a very large role in my life.

These articles were actually very informative and eye opening. I always knew in the back of my mind how important it was to keep at least a semi-professional presence on media, but this allowed me to see how unprofessional my media truly is.

If someone was looking to hire me, after one simple google search I am sure I would be cut. When you google my name alone, it pulls up a lot of the embarrassing pictures from my youth and a lot of my older accounts that I no longer use – Vine, SoundCloud,  YOUTUBE. My YouTube account alone was so awful. When I was younger I loved to make videos and editing them. This opened my eyes to how I need to take a step in getting my image cleaned up to a better standard.

My other media accounts (Instagram, Twitter, & Facebook) do all represent me in a fairly decent manner. I would say these media platforms represent me fairly well. They do need a little cleaning up, but nothing too major.

As of right now, I don’t think that I have a ‘personal brand’, but I do believe that that is something that I will need to begin to develop over the next few years in order to put myself in a position where an employer would hire me. This is a critical part of a job application that a lot of people fail to consider. People don’t realize that they will look into you to make sure you are who you say you are.

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.

For some reason the first article, “A Critique of Social Media”, was not able to pull up on my laptop. I’m not sure what the issue was, but the link would only bring me to a blank white page. I was able to read the second article, however.

This article really intrigued me because it had several valid points. I can relate to the entire article in a sense. He wrote about how individuals are constantly uploading new pictures to show to show that their life is just as interesting as the next persons. Over the summer while my friends were traveling the world and posting stunning pictures, I was stuck in Georgia working at Red Lobster six days a week. I felt like my life wasn’t nearly as glamorous as theirs were. Due to this, I can say that I posted pictures at times just to seem like I had something fun going on. I wanted to look like I was having just as great of a summer – even if that were the slightest from true.

I use each social media for something different. For example, I use Twitter to share quick highlights throughout my day to day life that might make people laugh. I use Instagram to post my favorite pictures from moments in my life that I find important. Facebook, however, I use to post all of my pictures into an album. I haven’t posted anything other than photos on Facebook for at least two years. I do believe that social media gives me what I want. It provides me with several different platforms to express myself and my beliefs. It also allows me to stay connected to the people that mean the most to me.

Since coming to UGA, my social media habits have for sure changed. In high school I had so much free time that I was constantly updating my feeds trying to stay up to date with all of the latest posts and tweets. It isn’t that easy anymore. With classes, two jobs, relationships, and organizations taking up nearly all of my time, it’s hard to find time to check social media. I typically check it only twice a day now – once when I wake up and another time before I go to bed. I find that this allows me to spend my day doing more important things. I’m no longer wasting hours on end scrolling through Twitter. I’ve found it much more efficient and productive, and I will probably continue to use it this way from here on out.

I personally do not see email as a legacy medium. While I may no longer email my friends and grandma on the regular, I still send and receive emails every single day. After reading the articles, I can easily relate to the ignorance of the student writing the email to their professor. During my junior year of high school I did dual enrollment, so I was taking classes at a local college. After taking my final exam in Sociology, my grade dropped from a 95 to an 89.46. I was very upset because I had never gotten a B before and I had worked so hard in that class. I emailed my profesor basically asking if he could possibly bump my grade up so that way I can end with an A. This email was the most unprofessional email I had ever written. It basically went similar to this: “Hey it’s Dakota Gulasa. I was wondering if you could possibly bump my grade up so that I will end with an A. I don’t want it to mess up my high school GPA.”

My profesor was livid! He made me meet with him to learn email etiquette because it was that bad. This issue may seem familiar with several college students. I believe that it suggests that young adults in this decade are living in a world of texting and messaging. They are not accustomed to formal writing when communicating with another individual. This leads to emails similar to mine where the student is basically texting their professor as if they are best friends. I can understand why professors get so outraged over this situation, because I am sure it happens very often.

I think that universities and professors prefer email is because any other type of media would simply be too personal. Having a professors phone number, Facebook, or even WhatsApp account information would cross a certain professional line. I would be very uncomfortable having to text my professor. I would much rather type out an email and have to wait for a response, then be able to send my profesor a text expecting an immediate answer.

All in all, I’m glad that I’ve learned my lesson about emailing professors and hope that next time I need my grade bumped up, it will happen without a problem.

I can distinctly remember begging my parents to allow me to create a myspace page in the fourth grade. Everyone who was anyone had one, and I couldn’t resist to follow the trend. I somehow convinced them to let me create one. When I was in the fourth grade, MySpace was all that people would talk about. It was an engaging, yet simple website that everyone was familiar with. Here we are nine years later, and look where MySpace is now. What was once an enormous media platform for individuals to socialize and interact has now became a graveyard of untouched profiles. As time passed, people began to transition to a different platform – Twitter. The idea behind a “legacy media” says that every media will eventually go out of date – typically within 10 years. Even though Twitter is the biggest rage currently, by the year 2030 will anyone still be using this platform, or will we have moved on to the next BIG THING? We can already see this transition beginning to happen. In the last three years, Twitter’s number of active users has began to drop. The drop has not been extremely significant, but I believe that it may be the beginning of a new legacy media.

There are several different media platforms in which I can send a friend a message. I could go through Facebook, Twitter, call them over the phone, or even by sending a simple text message. However, writing a letter is still a decently common form of contact between individuals. Now a days, people get excited over a letter in the mail. When I open the mailbox and see an envelope with my name on it, I am excited to see what the envelope has in store for me. I feel as if this creates a feeling that a text message just doesn’t create. I also believe that writing a letter is more personal. It shows that you took the time to gather the materials and put aside a few minutes to write out something meaningful. I wrote my letter to one of my closest friends who I haven’t seen since I went off to college. We will be seeing each other this weekend as we fly to Philadelphia together to see Rihanna and Coldplay perform, so I hope she will receive this letter before we head out. While I haven’t written a letter in some time, it didn’t feel the least abnormal to me. I assume this is because it’s similar to sending a very long, personal text message – which I frequently do send. This probe showed me that writing a letter may be outdated, but it has remained an excellent way to let someone know that you’re thinking about them.