Technology is everywhere today, and it seems to record just about everything. I was introduced to technology at a fairly young age. While the technology I was exposed to was quite different from the technology today’s children see, I still gained the familiarity and necessary understanding to participate in the early days of social media. Social media sites like Facebook were popular among my friends and I in our middle school days; it served as the place to tell everyone you were, “…captain of the cool kids” or wish your friend a happy birthday with some embarrassing pictures you had of them. This was the start of a new way to create your personal footprint on the world, one that lasts forever. Social media has certainly served as the data archive for my online presence, if I had to choose three separate platforms that have acted as the foundation to my online presence I would select Facebook, Twitter, and Apple Music.
Apple music has been around for a long time. The old iTunes days were a little different than today: paying for individual songs or buying an album, rather than paying a subscription for unlimited music. While this may not have been considered a social media and I may not have explicitly shared my iTunes playlists publicly, I do remember my friends and I sending our favorite playlists back and forth to each other. We had playlists for every scenario: whether we were at the pool, playing sports, on a road trip, there was even one to help pass the time for the occasional detention (not very proud of that last playlist). I still use Apple products, so I still have access to my old iTunes account and I can see all of the old songs I’d saved and playlists I had created. It’s fun to look back on what I used to listen to and occasionally share the playlists with my friends today who are lacking in a certain area of their musical literacy! While my friends and I created and shared playlists, we also joined Facebook. I can vividly remember my friends and I doing the math to figure out when our birthday needed to be in order for us to be eligible to sign up for Facebook, (you have to be 13 to sign up for Facebook, yet for some reason at the time it seemed comical to say we were 60). Scrolling through your Facebook profile can be both reminiscent and haunting. I enjoy seeing old pictures of a younger me, with old friends in my hometown. However, I am not a fan of my 6th grade haircut or the awkward comments I made while attempting to talk to a girl on Facebook. While it seems that Facebook started as a site similar to what Twitter is now, I have transitioned into mostly posting pictures on Facebook, so my family and friends can keep up with whatever is happening in my life. Facebook served as the dominant social media platform for me until I arrived in high school. Yet, once I got to high school and created my Twitter profile I was immediately active. Initially, I kept my profile public in the hopes that a good tweet could go viral and I could be Twitter famous for a few days. I found myself tweeting random thoughts to seem profound, at famous people hoping to get their attention, and weird jokes that I don’t really understand anymore. Unfortunately, the Twitter community did not react as excitedly as I expected to my tweets. Since then, I have conducted multiple full-profile investigations in hopes to delete some of the most embarrassing tweets, but who knows if they actually ever completely go away. My presence on Twitter today would amount to favoriting or retweeting tweets from famous people, my friends, or sports highlights. I don’t choose to express myself through actual tweets nearly as often as I used to, rather I enjoy reading others’ tweets and following different news throughout the day. One of the common messages paired with how technology could ruin our generation, is how what you post on the internet is there forever and can be found with enough effort. Countless warnings from professors, parents, and even friends that made a mistake on social media have cautioned me into paying close attention to my digital presence and maintaining a positive, professional image. After using social media for some time and realizing that my weird posts were showing up whenever someone searched my name on the internet I went private. My online presence, today, is mostly private, however, the tweets from the old days still linger and I’m sure would reappear if someone was willing to look hard enough (please don’t commit yourself to that). Overall, while I would have to say my total online presence is fairly small, I am pleased with the image I have created for myself and the archived data I will have to look back on throughout the years. Sam Molli
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AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. Archives
November 2018
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