This is my first attempt to do a brain dump. As this is an exercise the quality of this note may lack, but as it is supposed to be a directly dump of what I was thinking at the moment, it should be considered as a look inside my head at the particular moment/situation.
In class assignment: The last time i engaged in social media of any sorts, mostly something meaningful..
I've a lot of social media encounters along my day, most of them aren't meaningful in any way, as they a primarily ways of using or spending my time, or just out of pure boredom, and because I have nothing better to do.. Yet sometimes I 'dig' into my different media, e.g. when trying to find a particular person (not necessarily stalking!) or getting updates from around the world. Most of my interactions are very superficial, just checking to see if there should be any news from my friends, scrolling and scrolling, just to stop if something seems interesting, even though I don't really read everything while scrolling - If something pops out from the crowd, or just my the look of it seems interesting I stop, else I quit the app and continue doing whatever I was doing for the next five minutes, until I have to check again.
This can continue in an almost endless way, and from my own perspective it isn't very productive or even interesting, it's plain simply to kill time, when the TV is of no interest or when it's commercial time!
I think I should be more aware of my habits in this regard, sometimes it feels like checking Facebook and Twitter is the most natural thing to do, all.the.time. This can't be very healthy, and for the purpose of nothing, is seems some kind of ridiculous as I'm sitting here writing this.
In my opinion social media can be used for a lot of different, some more than others, interesting things. But very often it seems to be used only for the purpose of wasting/killing time, rather than actually having a meaningful purpose. But as I'm thinking about it, I had a reason to use Facebook the other day! In the Digital Identities course we've been assigned to do a Book Club thing, this means that we're supposed to read to books in a group, being able to present them afterwards. These groups is, of course, consisting of people from the course, and since I don't have any prior relations to a lot of the people attending the course, I find Facebook to be an excellent tool to get in touch, and arrange meetings. This meant I had to find the members of my Book Club group and set up a meeting. I did start out by doing a group on Facebook, thinking that would be the way to go; we could share a message board/wall, and when people joined, we could all come to an agreement. The idea kind of backfired, since this particular use-cased required that I had befriended all the persons I wanted to join my group, prior to actually adding them - Irritating!
Nevertheless I added the other persons to my 'friend' list, even though I by this time wouldn't consider them as 'friends', as we have just started to get to know each other, and that I'd normally wouldn't add people without getting to know them first. This is my idea of personal defense, as I'm sure to only let people who is related to my in a given, but reasonable way, before letting them in beyond the walls of my personal world. To be honest I really don't understand all the fuzz about having hundreds and thousands of friends on a site like Facebook, in my opinion these can't be actual and real friends? In this terminology 'friend' has become a person that you are, and maybe not even, familiar with, which is making the whole 'friend'-thing misunderstood. On LinkedIn you have connections and on Twitter you have followers, these terms are reasonable and sound. You connect with people you have worked with, or want to work with, and follow people interesting or somehow else worth of following, but that doesn't make you friends! But that is how Facebook works, and I can just sit here wondering about the term.. Friends.. What are friends, or our definition of friends, really? Is there a clear difference between online, so called friends, and real-life, as we normally would term them, friends?
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