Post 26: Social Media Sabbatical

Can I interest you in a Social Media Sabbatical?

We all know that social media can be addicting. Some of us are on these platforms for hours upon hours for different reasons. I think that it can sometimes be fun and scrolling through my feed is a little relaxing.

But what happens when social media becomes a daunting task? When it starts feeling like a job? When you start dreading it?

Take a Break! Unplug!

Unplugged by las is licensed under (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

I know that I will be taking a quick break after the semester finishes for rebooting and refocusing my attention. I would like to start using social media in my professional development and I think I might take a little time just mapping it out.

Will you be taking a social media sabbatical?

Here are some reasons why taking a break from social media might be a good option:

1.       Social media provides a distorted sense of reality.

2.       Social media can sometimes be a distraction.

3.       Social media does allow for interaction with your friends, but not always in a substantial way.

4.       Social media might cause you to seek validation from others. Too focused on how many “likes” or “retweets”.

I think social media can be a great tool in many of our endeavors, I would just like to find a balance on how many hours I spend on these platforms.

Post 25: Google+ for Curation!

I think Google is trying to take over the world. It has so many tools and offerings for users that you can’t help but want to create a Google account. They just recently launched the Google “Collections” feature.  

“…users are now able to build content collections based on topics and interests.

These collections include a group of posts on a particular topic that can either be shared publicly, privately or with specific sets of people – similar to Google+ posts themselves.”

This feature is very similar to the curation tools that you are already used to. Some suggest that Google was inspired by Pinterest. Are you a Google+ user? I never use my Google+ profile. I do use Google+ to login to other websites.

Do you use Google+?

Not sure if this new feature will be used by the community as expected, due to the fact that most Google+ users do not use this platform as their main social media tool. 

Post 24: Now What Do I Do With All This Junk?

As you can tell from my blog, I prefer to use a pseudonym for the many adventures in this class. With every social media tool introduced in our class, I have used the pseudonym. I created a separate gmail account for this pseudonym and tie every registration to this account. I only use this gmail account in this class and do not give it out otherwise.

From time to time, I check this gmail account for updates from social media sources.

Come to find I have a total of 207 emails! (That includes Primary, Social, and Promotion)

These are emails that I have received from the online communities I joined, Scoop.it, Delicious, Edmodo, Voicethread, Pinterest, Twitter, Quora, Diigo, Wikispaces, and all the other tools that I ventured to try in addition to the ones recommended.

Some of us are desensitized when we look at our inboxes and see hundreds of new emails. Most of the time, these emails are notifications, updates, or promotions. It takes me about an hour to ‘clear’ the junk and for a few precious minutes, my inbox is empty.

To the people that used their regular email accounts, have you also encountered a bombardment of social media emails?

Not to worry, most of the time these platforms, let you unsubscribe. Now the task is to figure out how…

Post 23: Digital Kidnapping...huh?

I think this would be tagged on the course blog as “internet creepiness”. On the topics of privacy that we are reviewing this week, I thought it would be apropos to discuss this interesting term.

So what is Digital Kidnapping?

It is essentially where users find a baby photo they like or want to have on social media, and ‘steal’ this photo and later post it and claim it as their baby or child.  I cannot even fathom why someone would want to claim to have a baby that is not their own or “play house” online. Parents who later find their babies’ photos being used elsewhere feel violated.

“Type "#BabyRP" into Instagram search. Thousands of photos of babies, children- even ultrasound pictures- will pop up. These photos do not belong to the users posting them.”

I do not have children of my own, so I would like to hear from the parents in the class... What are your thoughts?

I remember when my sister had her first child. My brother thought it would be funny to take a photo of her baby and make a meme out of it. She was extremely upset about it and did not let him post it anywhere. I guess she did not like the idea of her baby’s picture being plastered all over the internet on chat forums, websites, and/or social media.

Again, we circle back to the idea that we must feel comfortable with everything we post on these social media platforms because this information is not under lock and key. Others can and will take the information you provide (including baby pictures) and use it as they please.

What can you do to avoid digital kidnapping?

1.       A reverse image search on Google can help you find out if your photos are being used on other websites or social networks.

2.       You can watermark your photos before you post.

3.       Set your accounts to “private”