And So It Goes

In order for you to understand my knowledge and experience with social media, I feel you must learn when and how it all began, and how social media and I have progressed over the years. To start, let me tell you how it all began.

I didn’t know it at the time, but I’ve been an active social media user since before I knew it had a name. Actually, I have probably been a user since before it even had a name.

When I entered college, I was an active user of popular forms of online communication such as e-mail, instant messaging and chat rooms. Naturally, I was an avid user of MSN Messenger, Yahoo Messenger and of course AOL Instant Messenger. These were the means by which most people in college seemed to communicate.

During sophomore year, one of my roommates discovered something amazing: Xanga. Xanga is an online journal that lets you publish your thoughts so that all of your friends can log in and see what movie you just watched or what you had for breakfast that day. I was thrilled. Here was a site that allowed me to write out all of the most boring details of my life for all of my friends to see! Plus, I could read about their lives and we could all comment on each other’s posts. It was fantastic. My roommate and I could keep each other up-to-date on our lives without ever having to get off of our chairs and walk down the hall to see each other. Hooray for technology!

Xanga and I spent two beautiful months together before I was introduced to something even more delightful. It was site called Livejournal Livejournal was basically the same concept as Xanga, except now I could include a little smiley face with posts to indicate my mood, as well as let the world know what music I was currently listening to. Plus, I discovered that I knew a lot more people who used Livejournal than who used Xanga.

Livejournal and Xanga gave me my very first experience with blogging. I maintained my Livejournal through all of my undergraduate career and then became bored with it in grad school when I decided that perhaps I shouldn’t plaster the most intimate details of my daily life all over the internet. Using Livejournal and Xanga was a great experience for me overall because it gave me my first experience with blogging and also had me writing every day.

Around the same time that I started using Livejournal, I also signed up for another site that would drastically alter the way I socialized and kept in touch with people. The site was called Facebook. Here I could create a profile with my photo, my contact information and my interests. I could connect with people that I had lost touch with since high school. I could comment on other people’s profiles. I felt that I had never encountered anything so wonderful. The Facebook I joined back in 2004 is drastically different than the Facebook I use today, but I will save a discussion of that for another post.

In the span of a few short months I had gone from communicating online on a one-on-one basis to communicating simultaneously to an entire network of people. At the time I had no idea how drastically this type of communication would change the way I interacted with the world and how important it would become to the public relations degree I was pursuing.

But I will save that story for Part 2.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 22nd, 2009 at 12:07 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.