#DIGC101 Week 5 My Social Networking Usage
I began my obsession with social networking sities back in 2007 with Myspace. I never used the previous internet chats like MSN, because I liked personal inetraction better. I tried to be cool and not conform to joining MSN by contacting my friends with the good old fashion phone. It wasn’t till I saw my sister register for myspace that my interests in SNS’s began. Of coarse I paid her out for joining myspace, but a few weeks later after jealously watching her design backgrounds and profile pictures, I subscribed.
I think with Myspace I was more drawn to this design function. I liked just easily manipulatable the backgrounds where to suit my personality and likes. I never really thoughts about who was looking at what I was producing till my sister asked me, “So, how many friends do you have?”. I blame that one question for my obsession with SNS and the idea of collecting friends. I know it’s shallow to care about my friend count, but for some reason I do!
I evolued from Myspace to Facebook in 2008. I still use Myspace for its other functions like for fashion trends, music and movies, but I choose to connect with my peers on Facebook. My favorite function is ‘Mutal Friends’. As disscussed in the Boyd & Ellison (2007) reading finding “latent ties”, its the idea of meeting strangers only to discover that we have personal connections through other friends.
Also as the Ellison et al (2007) reading looks at, Facebook has the ability to “to keep in touch with old friends and to maintain or intensify relationships”. With my mum and her Facebook profile, it has strengthen our realtionship to the point that she know whos talking to me and what I’m up to most of the time. My friends thinking it’s funny to tag bad pictures of me, knowing that my mum may see them before I have a chance to delete them!
This year with my uni coarse I have upgarded to using the SNS sites Twitter, Tumblr and Delicious. I only really use these for my studies, except inthe case of Twitter where I use it to celeibrity stalk or find out news form around the world. My twitter profile is almost purely used to follow others rather than get people to follow me (almost opposite to Facebook).
