Social Media Thoughts: LJ1

    I first started using social media back in 2007 or 2008, with my chosen platform being MySpace. The popular things to post back then were really terrible selfies and those quiz chains. MySpace soon started to fizzle out and everyone moved to FaceBook. I don't recall ever posting anything on FaceBook besides travel check-ins over the years. The only time I ever really posted on social media was on Instagram between 2015-2017. I would post photos of anything I thought looked pretty or that I thought was funny. Since then I have rarely ever posted anything. If I post nowadays it would be like a travel photo on my Instagram story. The shift in my mentality about posting things online is due to all the stories about online stalking and just realizing how much people can find out about you without much effort. 

With that being said, I have a few "don'ts" for posting on social media. 

• Never post a photo of a location if I am currently there- I always wait until later in the day after I have left to post something.
• If I wouldn't be okay with my family or coworkers seeing something, I will not post it. 

My list of "Dos"

• Keep all profiles on private (except LinkedIn)
• Think about all audiences my post could reach before posting something

I don't really have any regrets about anything I posted when I first started using social media. However, if I could go back to when I first started using social media, I would have been way more private with everything. 

Social Media Thoughts:

For me personally, I don't think anyone needs to see what I am doing in life, and I also don't need to know what everyone else is doing. So I do not use social media as an outlet for self-expression. I think it is great that other people have made careers out of it and they can use it to get through difficult times, but it doesn't check those boxes for me. 

I actually think social media is incredibly toxic for the average person. It is easy to see someones posts about their life and compare it to yours, even when you know that everything is perfectly curated to portray only the highlights and its just not real. Same thing applies to selfies or just any photo in general. The editing apps that have been coming out over the past few years are wild! So many people edit their photos to make themselves look better or they will even edit the backgrounds to make travel destinations look cooler. 

Overall, I am not a fan of social media. This is why I have deleted SnapChat, FaceBook, Twitter, and I majorly restricted my Instagram. The majority of my friend group also deleted most social medias, so that definitely helps. I have been seeing a lot of people in my age group deleting all social media or just cutting back a lot. Maybe social media is about to have another major change?