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.