Balancing between two worlds

I think that social media technologies gives me tools for both increasing my social network as well as maintaining my network. However, I do think about what I write and publish on the Internet. As an example, I choose the photos of me on Facebook. If other people are uploading photos of me I usually un-tag them. Mainly because it is just a few of my friends who uploads photos, which might result in a misleading photo collection on my profile. I might not go to one event very often, but all of my tagged photos might be from that type of event. In short, I want my profile on Facebook to be consistent with how I present myself in public. However, I do not see social media technologies as something worrying. As long as you are aware of the consequences, it really widens people's abilities to socialise with others.

The development of media technologies is something that interests me. I really like the idea of using one computer instead of keeping books in a bookshelf, CD's in another bookshelf and videos or DVD's in another bookshelf. I rather like to use Wikipedia than an encyclopaedia that fills my bookshelf.

I might not be very active in creating content on sites like Wikipedia or other communities. When I am about to do something I never done before I usually google my questions about the subject. Often some communities have already discussed the topic and I can learn from that. However, when I think about it, I am a member of a food network site, where you create a profile and share recipes with each other. It is great to get a shopping list so that you acctually go out from the store with ingredients that later that week can be combined into a meal!

Another way I have used social media is in one of my courses this semester. We used Wiki spaces to discuss the literature in the course. The discussion was part of the examination and we had limited space to write our comments. I think it was good because it was time flexible. We usually had about four days per discussion to write our comments and you could choose when you wanted to do it. On the other hand, a lot more time was spent in front of the computer and less time in socialising in real life. To me social media technologies are not about living in a second world. It is about being able to be more afficient in keeping contact with other people. 

I believe that socialising on the Internet is different compared to how you socialise in real life. Therfore I think that it is important to learn both. To much time spent in front of the computer makes it difficult to act natural in a face-to-face context. In the future, when more and more people use social media technologies, you will of course have to know the computer-socialising techniques as much as you will have to know the face-to-face way of acting. I believe that the key to success is to stay in both worlds.

Marie Martinson