Walking into the semester, I wasn’t really sure what I was expecting. But, I’m glad that I selected this FYOS because I learned so much about different types of media from different perspectives. Some of the blog posts that really peaked my interest were the posts about legacy media, social media audits, and the autoethnography because I was able to learn about different types of media as well as analyze my own usage. I’ve never look at how I used my social media because it was just another things that was a part of my life. But after the evaluation, I learned to better make use of my time.

Overall, the entire class was a really good experience. After this class, my interest in Communication Studies has increased so I am considering taking class in this subject.

I’m looking toward a future in the medical field as a doctor. I feel like with Healthcare, there are so many ways that Social Media can be used in order to benefit patients and the general population in terms of informing people about solutions and potential cautions to keep in mind in different situations. A potential issue with this is that sometimes there are fake links and articles that are created that contain false information which could misguide patients in their decision-making for their health.

However, there is some possible positive outcome from the online discussion on forums and social media sites in that patients with serious issues are able to find others who are going through similar situations. It creates a safe space where people can talk about their experiences and get advice. I think that this is definitely a plus when it comes to the connectivity of social media.

Social media usage by healthcare professionals has been at times harmed them in that in some situation when they post about their experiences online they have lost their jobs due to patient confidentiality and other ethical issues. An NIH article explained situations in which ER personnel’s online posts and Medical students’ cadaver pictures have lost their jobs (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3863578/).

Another really big part of the Medical field in terms of the spread of knowledge are Medical Journals. Some of the most influential journals are the New England Journal of Medicine whose impact factor is 59.558, the Lancet whose impact factor is 44.002 and the Nature Biotechnology whose impact factor is 42.113 as reported by the NIH (https://tools.niehs.nih.gov/srp/publications/highimpactjournals.cfm). The impact factor is how often a journal is quoted in a year. These journals contain a lot of information about new technology and potential cures and treatments to different conditions.

After looking at my media usage last week, I decided to make some changes and evaluate my usage for two days, Friday and Saturday, in order to get my usage on a day when I have school and a day when I don’t have school. On Friday because I only had one class, I had to put in a lot more effort to ensure that I wasn’t spending time on my phone. I spent a lot of my time off my phone by keeping my self busy with homework, or taking a nap or something of that sort. But, I did a pretty good job of it by reminding myself that I should be more productive and the best way to do so was to stay off my phone. I also used PocketPoints which was also a huge factor as to I was not touching my phone, therefore not logging into any social media. I only scrolled through my social media when I woke up in the morning and right before I was about to fall asleep, which is what I do on a regular basis and I don’t mind it. I’ve kept my habit of only being on social media when I’ve gotten a notification instead of the  mindless scrolling that I used to do. I’ve also worked on making sure that my phone is away from me while I’m studying or working on homework in order to further avoid any distractions like notification which could lead me to get back on social media thus leading to wasted time on social media.

It was a little bit more difficult controlling my social media usage on Saturday because I had no classes and I spent a lot of my day at the game or relaxing which gave me a lot of opportunities to be on my phone. Because of the massive amount of free time I had increased, I found that it required a lot more changing to my schedule to ensure that I didn’t spend more time than I wanted to allocate to my social  media usage. I found myself constantly reminding myself to stay off my phone, more than I’d like. However, when looking back at my usage at the end of the day, I found that I used it less than I usually would’ve and I also found that I didn’t mind the limitation I had set for myself and actually enjoyed it because I could spend more time on focusing on the game, or homework, or whatever leisure activity that I was participating in.

Overall, I found it very interesting how much I had to change my usage and how analyzing the usage by hours affected how I addressed it. I think the analysis has given me a new perspective about my personal media usage and what the best schedule is in order to maximize my  usage while at the same time not wasting my time on it.

I logged my media usage on Thursday and Saturday and I wasn’t really surprised because I know that I use media that much. The only thing that threw me off was seeing on paper exactly what I was doing with my phone. On Thursday I had 2 classes that were 75 minutes long so I didn’t spend a lot of time on my phone. I noticed that on Thursday I spent a lot of time on my phone when I was on the bus or when I was eating alone. Sometimes, I would get distracted if I was not focusing on getting my homework done. On Saturday, I had a lot more free time so I ended up spending more time on my phone. I had friends visit so that helped in making me get off my phone. I usually spend more time on my phone on the weekends because I have a lot more time on my hands.

At the end of these days after analyzing these two days I realized that I should reduce the amount of leisure time I spend on my phone. Although I knew that I spend a lot of time on my phone, after looking at it on the paper, written down, I realized that I spend a lot more time than I’d like. However, I think that I don’t spend mindless time on Instagram. I’ve recently started working on only being on social media when I actually have to respond to people.

The articles that we read got me thinking about my social media usage even though I’m not super active on social media. I think the idea of a social media brand is a concept about someone’s perception about a user on different platforms of social media. My social media presence isn’t very active although I do like pictures constantly and sometimes comment on a couple of friend’s posts. I went through the different steps that each of the websites asked you to go through. I ended up changing a couple of things about my social media usage. For example, I googled myself and found pictures of me from 5^th grade which was interesting. None of the things that popped up, one of them being a link to my posts on this sit, bothered me enough to want to delete them. I found a couple of things that showed random movie industries like the Hunger Games whose pages I had liked popped up which I went back and unliked because all of it was from middle school and my freshman year of high school. I also untagged myself from some embarrassing Instagram and facebook pictures because they were just weird and from a while ago.

It was interesting looking through all my old posts and I also made it a point to delete all my posts from my first few years of high school because that was when I used to post weird status updates and cliché quotes. I got rid of any posts that I had shared about anything controversial or political to remain as unbiased as possible on the internet. I read a while ago that many employers and colleges monitor their potential candidates’ social media presence and I didn’t want any posts I had made to affect a potential employer’s perception of me.

I don’t think that I have a “personal brand” but I do think that if someone does come to having it, it should be maintained because it really does showcase a person’s perception to the entire world which can affect a lot of things in that person’s life.

Overall, going through all my social media helped me to refresh through my content and clean it up to make it more presentable. It was also an eye-opener to how my presence on social media has changed since freshman year of high school, four years. I’m glad I had the option to do it because I don’t think I would’ve done it for a long time had I not gone through the articles and even this assignment.

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.

After reading the review of the book, “Terms of Service”, I came to realize that I’ve noticed a lot of the topics that the author, Jacob Silverman is presenting in my life. One of the most interesting things that stuck out to me was his mentioning of the scenario in which a person posts about being at a party. He states that at one point a person no longer cares about having fun at the party but making sure everyone else knew that they were having fun at the party almost making any enjoyment almost superficial. He made social media out to be a sort of facade that we use in order to create this sort of false reality for others to see and believe as true. The problem is that he’s probably right.

At the beginning of high school, when I first got a facebook, I used to post really cheesy and weird posts that were supposed to be funny but were totally unoriginal. After getting a snapchat I became that person that documented just about everything in my life on snapchat because it was such an easy way to show people my life but almost make it out to be as enjoyable as I could make it “seem”. It became a habit of mine, a bad one to be honest. After a while I realized how exposed my life was and how easy it was for anyone to see what my life was like, the positive parts. Since then, I’ve cut down on my snap story posts, and rarely use facebook unless I’m posting a couple of pictures from my freshman year or checking out what friends are up to.

I’ve found that a lot of people that I know post constantly about their lives and how they’re doing. There are constant snaps about food and where they filled their gas. A lot of what I was seeing mirrored how I used to use my social media which included constant updates to let people know that there was SOMETHING going on in my life. I think if people want to record their lives that publicly, it should be their choice to do so. However, I think many people don’t consider the consequences of putting out entire life on social media, which is a serious factor that needs to be considered and one that Silverman highlights.

After reading the two links, one that is more comical and the other that is more serious, I was honestly able to better understand how to write e-mails to a professor. One of the things that stuck out to me the most was the clear distinction with the more serious article and the implied distinction with the more comical article between a professional and personal e-mail.

A lot of times when e-mails are sent to professors, the line between sending a serious and professional e-mail and sending an e-mail as if to a friend is blurred. One of the biggest reasons that this mistake happens more often than not is that students are never made aware of how exactly an e-mail should even be sent. In the current generation, people have grown up using e-mail constantly but never in a professional manner. It was always a fun way to communicate with friends. So the jump can sometimes affect people differently, leaving them to not be aware of how to properly communicate with a professor.

Colleges and even high schools demand that students use the school e-mail to contact teachers with any matter. E-mail is the most widely used type of communication in the educational system. Part of the reason is that administrators are able to keep all forms of communications between faculty and students in one place, making it easy to find any specific communication for any reason.

However, the question of why colleges and universities don’t use different forms of social media such as Facebook or WhatsApp raises the issue of how much more personal communications become between a professor and a student. Social media is much more personal, allowing access to more than just academic performance or curriculum information. Students are able to access personal data about professors and vice versa through these communications and tracking any of it becomes much harder because how big the social media platforms are.

I personally didn’t start using e-mail till about 7th grade which was when my middle school set up e-mail servers for the students and the teachers. From then on, I used e-mail very frequently and still do. However, I rely more on social media solely to contact friends or family because of how much more accessible it is.  E-mail has always been something I saw as being used by me in more professional settings in which I needed to contact an employer, professor, organization, etc.

Google defines Legacy Media as “traditional means of communication and expression that have existed since before the advent of the new medium of the Internet.” An example of this legacy media that struck me when I understood the concept of legacy media was the book. Following Google’s definition, books are indeed very traditional and date back to ancient times during which books were used as a means of communicating and recording information. Books still serve the same purpose hundreds of years later. However, they have rapidly begun to be replaced because of the growing technology that records the same information that would usually be recorded in books to be recorded on a computer which stores the information for much longer.

Personally, I loved books as a child. I would read for hours at a time and stay up with a flashlight underneath my blanket to avoid getting in trouble. However, as I grew up I would always tell myself that I would read this book that looks really good but I could no longer bring myself to do it because why read the book when I could read it online or find out what happens, online. In high school, I was a part of the IB Program which emphasized research and discovery which forced me to go to research libraries and look up the books and read through them to find the information that I needed for my papers. I was always so surprised by the amount of information that was still stored in the books. However, a lot of the information was in the “electronic library” which made it slightly easier to complete my research from the comfort of my room.  For some topics I didn’t even have to go to the library because all the information I needed was on the internet.

Websites like scholar.google.com and galileo hold a ton of information which made it easier to do research without having to go out looking for the book. If this option didn’t exist, one would definitely have to use books. I actually think that the value of books sort of goes down because so much is online now that no one feels that books are important. I wouldn’t say that books are no longer important or would eventually stop being used. However, I would say that a majority of books and the information that they hold, especially record books might eventually all be transcribed so that IF there comes a time where a book cannot be located, its information is not totally gone.

A good friend of mine, Shivani, is attending Georgia Tech as a freshman this year. One of her favorite things was to send people mail. From care packages to letters, everything. So when Dr. Menke told us that we’d be writing a letter to someone, I knew I had to write one to Shivani.

I’ve never actually properly written a letter before. I would only write a few sentences on a card. Something along the lines of a “Happy Birthday! Have a great day!”. But writing a letter is so much more different because it requires a lot more effort than a simple pre-messaged card. I found that writing letters was a lot more extensive than sending a text or video calling. I had to think about what I was gonna write and how much I could write before I couldn’t write anymore. I couldn’t attach funny memes or post links for good songs.

As a very sentimental person if I were to receive a letter, I’d keep it for a very long time, reading it over the years. Because of this, writing the letter struck me differently, in a good way. It was a completely different experience and I might actually take it up as a regular habit.