Social media can be an area for individuals to express their personal thoughts, feelings, and explore the world through others. Social media allows for individuals to communicate, share information, advertise, and the options are endless of its abilities. In the most recent years social media has become a daily use for many individuals. It has become available and acceptable for all individuals to use daily. As I grew as an individual in this society, I realized that my inappropriate posting needed to be addressed especially for my future employment purposes.
In the beginning of my social media adventure I began with MySpace in 2008. This account is no longer available since I took it down many years ago. MySpace was a social media account that I used to express my feelings about my adoption in 2009. This website allowed for users to post background images and play music on the users profile. The images and music that I chose to post were emotional since this was a sensitive point in my life. Later in that year Facebook had become the most popular use of social media among my age group.
In the last months of 2009 I decided to switch over to using Facebook instead of MySpace since my peers were encouraging everyone to use this form of social media instead. In the beginning I was unfamiliar with this form of social media, which lead my account not to be active for some time. The start of Facebook much different then it is today but as the years went on the site became more user friendly. As years went by Facebook developed and grew into the modern day user-friendly site that it is today. Once I got a better of understanding of this platform I decided to explore this outlet from the basic profile to the information that you can share with friends and family.
When I was around 15 years old the idea of uploading pictures onto Facebook was very popular along with editing them. The images that were posted on Facebook were not photos of myself that I would want to represent my current self. Although, these photos do show how I have grown over the years to become the person I am today. These photos demonstrate how different I dress, look, and presented myself from my past to the present. Also, the captions I would use for the photos have changes along with the photos that I post over the years.
As of today I use several platforms of social media that include Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, Time Hop, and Twitter. The main use of my social media is through Facebook. In the beginning, my use of Facebook was to express my emotions about my family, friends, and romantic relationships through posting dramatic comments. The type of vocabulary that was used to express those emotions was inappropriate and disrespectful to those reading it. At this time in my life I was unaware of the damage that can be done by social media posting and the reflection of what you post upon yourself.
In relations to my social media identity and my academic identity are complete opposite of each other with small similarities. There are similarities such as growth and developing a new pathway for my future. My academic pathway has started out as something I did not know if I actually wanted to in regards to early childhood education but with time I figured out my calling in the social work department at Longwood University. Over the years knowledge through education has grown into a new pathway for my future in social work. Through photos on social media it can show the many different locations that I have gone through to help build the new pathway that I am currently on.
The differences of my social media identity and academic identity are substantial. My view on education has always been important and social media did not become important until I used it to see how family members are doing. My academic identity has always been professional since I was an ambassador for my first college. That shaped my academic identity into a professional manner unlike my social media accounts.
These similarities and differences between my social media and academic identity have affected my life in both positive and negative ways. In a positive manner the experience has allowed for growth in my use of social media and remain professional in my academic identity. As the images and post come up through the app Time Hop I realized how negatively these items were and how that was being presented to my family and friends. These posts and images have created issues with friends and family members that ended relationships. My future civic and professional identity will benefit from these positive and negative experiences that I have had through social media.