Me and Social Media: a 21 year old’s experience with social media.

I am a part of the generation that grew up with the emergence of social media. As a collective, it is pretty evident, that we are obsessed with likes, pictures and online affirmation. Throughout this blog, I will be reflecting on my own use of social media- and my use of social media for microblogging, and journalism.

In all honesty, I am a frequent user of social media. If not an over user. I know this, yet it was only when reflecting on my use of social media that I realised how much I use it. For me, and for many people around my age, the most popular social media platform is Instagram. It is said that one billion people use Instagram, and no wonder- New York University professor Adam Alter explains that:

The minute you take a drug, drink alcohol, smoke a cigarette if those are your poison, when you get a like on social media, all of those experiences produce dopamine, which is a chemical that’s associated with pleasure.

Evidently, this is keeping us coming back for more. That good feeling we receive when our posts are greeted with compliments and likes, is creating a world obsessed with social media. This made me realise, why social media is such an important and effective tool for news and journalism.

By utilising social media as a tool for journalistic reasons, I discovered how easy it is to engage with wider audiences. It is also so simple to stay up to date: with your timeline, and explore pages constantly up dating with the most relevant and recent posts- you are constantly connected with up to date news, though it may not always be correct.

According to Ofcom- The Office of Communications- 45% of people get their news from social media. When thinking about my experience using social media for personal use- I constantly get my news updates from social media. For example, Snapchat has short stories from major news companies; like BBC News and Sky News. Therefore, with my high use of social media I still feel like I am constantly connected to the news around me. I also discovered doing my own research and use social media as a tool for journalism, that so many people like me use platforms like Twitter for their news. Commenting on several posts on Twitter, I saw that my account had engagement- whether it was people liking my replies, retweeting or commenting. Not only is the news easy to receive on social media- it is also interactive.

When updating my Instagram stories with news updates, I was able to add polls- this is also available on Twitter when you are composing tweets. This further adds to how social media has made the news more of an interactive thing then something that you just hear on the radio, read in a newspaper or watch on TV. Social media has combined all of these elements into one form- multimodality- as not only can you read the news, there will also be audio clips, pictures and videos attached to the updates.

As I look at my own personal social media use, I realised just how much news is available at the click of a button on social media- and upon using social media as a tool as a journalist I have discovered just how much people rely upon social media as their source.