From Project to Leisure – My Instagram Conversion

Months ago, my friends began trying to convince me to download and maintain my own instagram account. I had always neglected the idea, thinking that it would waste a lot of my time by constantly being distracted with yet another app on my phone. As one friend would give up struggling with me, another would begin to try and convince me. Two of my friends, in particular, would especially poke fun at me for not having an instagram account yet. When the course started and I heard that I would need to begin a new social media platform that I have never used before, I didn’t even hesitate to decide which one because I immediately knew which one I would choose. So I downloaded instagram and looked for my two friends, followed them, and within hours received a text from each of them saying, “You finally caved.” Aside from the fact that I knew I would probably start one sooner or later, I was quite pleased to find a sweet reason to justify starting one sooner. During the entirety of this semester, I myself have established my own instagram account and have begun to follow all of my friends and family who already are using it. I have found myself enjoying it a lot, and I find it very easy to get a quick update of what fun activities everyone is up to by simply scrolling through all of the photos on my feed.

I would say the hardest thing for me concerning instagram is probably finding things interesting enough to post on my profile. I don’t want to be that friend who is always posting photos of the food I’m eating, or taking selfies of myself every day to prevent my friends from forgetting what I look like all the time. Oddly enough, I don’t think I am the only one with this problem: 37% of instagram users have never uploaded a photo! And another 25% of users have an average of only 1-3 photos! So I look for opportunities when I feel I am laughing or enjoying myself, and (if I remember) I take a picture to post on instagram. I especially like posting photos of myself with others, instead of just myself, because I feel a lot more personable when I include them. I think that the biggest problem was probably my taking so many credits this semester, which somewhat prohibited me from doing a lot of fun things to document. Unless of course you find the library thrilling or get a kick out of working in faculty housing maintenance, the rest of my time this semester has been rather uneventful. Aside from my hesitation to post everything I did every second of the day, I did check it often every day. I would say I check my instagram a minimum of 4-5 times a day. Just whenever I have a free second with nobody around to talk to or I’m bored in a class, I will scroll through my feed to see if there are any new photos posted from my friends. At times it became a bother because sometimes I would check and nothing would be new, so I would feel like I had just wasted 20 seconds of my life somehow. The feeling wouldn’t last long, but it would deter me from checking again anytime soon. Other than that, I found it pretty natural to use the platform every day, and I very much enjoyed it most of the time.

I would recommend instagram to anybody. I find it to be a very interesting way to find out more about those I don’t know super well, and a fun way to keep up with those who you are already very close with. I would, of course, warn one to be very careful when using it, that they watch how they portray themselves in pictures and comments. But altogether, I think most of the younger generation should have one and be able to share their fun moments with the rest of the world. For the older generations, I’m a bit biased, and believe it is more targeted towards the youth. After all, 90% of instagram users are all under 35 years old, with 28% being within the 18-29 years old bracket. It is very compatible with one’s facebook profile, and can simultaneously post photos to both at the same time. I love it, and plan on keeping my instagram account (as opposed to Twitter) to continue sharing my fun moments with all of my friends and see how they are doing as well.

I loved this class.

Some things you might already know about facebook

            The funniest thing happened this week! (I told this story in class while we were discussing the negative aspects of facebook) The morning of my group’s facebook presentation, I got a message from an old friend. We grew up together and have been facebook friends for a long time, but we don’t really make any effort to talk to each other anymore. So I’m getting ready for class that morning when I see I have a facebook message. It’s him, and the message says, “Trevor are you mad?” to which I respond, “Am I mad? Why?” Well, my ‘friend’ goes on to explain how somebody had posted photoshopped pictures of me on an Internet page and that I should ask them to take them down. He sent me some broken link and told me how to enter it into the browser correctly to see my pictures… I started laughing to myself as I instantly realized this obviously wasn’t my friend at all, but a hacker. So I started to go along with it to see how far he would go. I asked if they were the pictures he took of me last week (I haven’t seen him in years) to which he replied he was not sure, but possibly. Then my friend jumped back onto his facebook and changed his password, thus ending my discussion with this hacking stranger. Too bad, I really enjoyed talking with the guy…

            Well this week we had to prepare for our group presentations. Lucky for us, our group got assigned to teach the rest of the class about facebook...  But who doesn’t already know everything about facebook? We all have one (even our teacher) and our entire class communicates via facebook for homework and collaborations. So the task of teaching the class about facebook was actually very interesting because my group and I went searching for things that the class wouldn’t already know. I was particularly blessed because my group assigned me to head the business and education section of our project (Given, I am the only business major in our entire class). Easily enough, I went searching and found a lot of information about businesses using facebook. Facebook even has its own page promoting business on their site (See it here) which I won’t go into explaining too much, because it’s already very well organized on their website.

            Just over a year ago, I had the privilege of serving the Lord shoulder to shoulder with the owner/entrepreneur of Mystic Chains Co. He himself launched the company with a friend in November, and consecutively created a facebook page to promote it. Needless to say, facebook has been a great media amplifier for their business and is a fun way to get potential customers interested in their products. Check out their page if you have some time, and you can see all of the pictures sent in from customers, as well as contests and sales they promote on facebook, too.

            As for the education side of facebook: I don’t have much to say. I believe that to use facebook as an educational resource you would first have to educate the person who plans on using it on how to effectively learn from it. The facebook education page itself seems like just a bunch of links to other educational resources. Given that it does connect people to educational opportunities, I wouldn’t necessarily consider it a primary educational resource. There have been countless apps and games created on facebook to promote online learning, but none of them seem to be as effective as a real classroom setting, or simply better-developed software.  I believe that facebook is primarily a social platform, and will always be primarily social regardless of any attempts to promote its educational use. It is what it is: A social platform. And there are so many well-developed software programs for teaching out there, that it seems like a waste of time to try converting facebook into a platform for them too.