My Social Media Life or My Cyber Footprint

The class assignment got me thinking of how, when, why I use social media and I realised something: I am there because of my friends and my job. At sometime or other I had to share something with them and social media made it easier.

Work has also has sent me to explore social media.

I feel we all have to have a digital profile in order to exist, and like in real life, what we put in determines what we get out of it.

Thank you, Squared Online

It is now a month since I signed up for Google’s Squared Online (#squaredonline) and I think this gives me the perfect excuse to reflect here on what I have gained from the course so far.

It is often the case that one enters a particular project with a very clear idea of what it will be like and what experiences and knowledge will be gained from such experience. That was not quite the case with Google’s Squared Online , which is the reason why I signed up for the course in the first place.

Online learning is now a common experience: Lynda.com and Coursera are just some great examples of successful learning experiences. Squared Online is a bit more different, thought. It is truly interactive and hands on. Reflection is not only encouraged, it is compulsory as part of the compulsory assignments.

Under the guidance of the course lecturers and resources that are part of the first module of the course and reinforced by the comments and assignments of my fellow students I have been able to learn this much already:

The internet has revolutionised our lives much more than any other cares to admit. We have adapted so easily to new channels of information that we don’t often realise that the information itself is also changing.

I am not making the best use of these new resources, and this applies to my professional and personal lives.

When preparing the Digital Life Slide assignment I realised that I am part of Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, a blog, email, etc. I don’t consider myself a Luddite, far from it: I have been around computers since the early 1990s, I have two laptops, a tablet and a smart phone, which I use daily.

And yet, I now see, thanks to Squared Online, that I am not making the best use of the technology at my disposal to dig deeper into the many lines of communication and sources of information. Find my own blogs boring: I have failed to use them for a unique purpose, as such their purpose has diluted and they are little more than a notebook of random thoughts. My use of Facebook, Twitter and the like is very sporadic. My Facebook life video has put slides of people, activities and places which are mere footnotes in my everyday life, a friend pointed that out to me when I published the video. I seem to use Twitter just to attract the attention of the Customer Services of big companies – the ones who seem to be listening, even if they can do very little to solve the actual problem. I have not done anything in Pinterest and other similar sites since the day I joined them. I only check LinkedIn when I am looking for a job or for employees.

In summary, I am wasting my digital life. Squared Online has made me see the many opportunities available. I am most excited about the coming lectures and assignments because I see now how much they are going to help me to build a digital life I can be proud of. 

I am a curmudgeon who doesn't like social media

Why I don’t bother with social media – well because it’s full of very unhappy people, who complain about everything…like me!

First of all to say that I do have accounts in several social media platforms, which initially never bothered to update. Then my friends started updating their own status and I felt I had to add my two pennies worth every now and then and never thought much about it. Until I started Squared Online and I asked myself why I, who has adopted every gadget under the sun (I even have a Pebble watch, a very silly thing to have, I admit), has resisted to fall for social media.

Let’s start with Facebook. When I first joined I used an alias instead of my full name. Gradually friends found me and to this date it has remained a friends only network. Some of those friends have started using Facebook messenger, which annoys me no end. I prefer email.

Twitter. I was a very late adopter of this network and I am still doubtful as to its potential. Part of me thinks it could be a wonderful way of communicate. The limitation to 140 characters could help users to sharpen their wits. A sort of Haiku. I am still working on this, although in the meantime I only tweet tennis results or silly updates about Clumsy Ninja to get free lives. I have certainly failed to make the best possible use of Twitter.

Blogging seems to offer a great opportunity to say all those important things we feel strongly about. And yet, I have not really taken to it. I have two or three half abandoned blogs littering cyber-space. They are of very different topics. It is only now, as part of this exercise, that I have forced myself to really think about why I had given them up so quickly. It was not the lack of things to say, it was boredom. Those were just monologues, individual ramblings and as such boring.

This is exactly the reasons why I like sending and receiving emails. Much more so than telephone calls. I can’t always take the time to talk at length on the telephone, but an email I can answer easily. Emailing is my blogging, Facebook and Twitter combined.

I am a conversationalist and I like choosing who I talk with. That’s why social media, in its current format, is not quite for me.

A critique to Prosumer Report’s Millenials: The Challenger Generation. Vol 11, 2011.

I read this report a while back and I really didn't take to it back then. Today I re-read the whole thing again and jotted down some of the reasons I didn't like it.

It is my opinion that this report presents a very rosy view of an entire generation which so far has been responsible for an increase in consumerism, a drop in literacy, and one of the most mindless protests (London 2011) in recent times.

The report praises the close and positive relationship between this and the previous generation. I acknowledge that these generations are united by a sense of collaboration that has not existed in previous ones. However, this collaboration is based on two principles:

•          Parents want to be seen as young and adopt some of the characteristics of their children to achieve this. The negative result of this is that the parents’ generation has failed to grow up. They are the Peter Pan generation. Their lack of responsibility has caused one of the worst economic crises in history.
•         Children know they need their parents’ support to maintain their status. With no job, or a badly paid one, and with a lifestyle which is way over their means, they have seen that antagonising the older generation is in detriment of their interests.

They are also great manipulators. They grow faster than their predecessors because they have easier access to information, and to so much of it that they don’t know what to do with it. This and the fact that they have not been able to leave the family home or attain the same economic status than their parents at their age has made this generation more insecure. Hence their constant need from approval who they try to achieve by reporting everything they do and expect Likes for it.

But then again, this description of an entire generation applies to a very specific group: the middle class in developed countries. There are a vast majority that cannot relate to technology in the same way because either they can’t afford the latest gadgets or because the limitations of their levels of literacy. These are the young ones who took part in the London and Paris riots and who will be likely to start the next revolution or at least be cannon fodder of those orchestrating it (think of the Arab Spring in Egypt and how their aspirations have been hidden behind a thick veil).

Squared Online Module 1 - Video

Here it is: short and sweet (I hope).

http://youtu.be/zKzerCIUfFo