A Peek Into the Mind of Mikey G

I think that a couple of the darker drivers of human motivations are money and power. There isn’t anything wrong with these two tools intrinsically but I believe that there will always be a group of people who will abuse things and use them with bad intentions. I thought this module reinforced a lot of what I believe social media will lead to. If you take a look at the history of media you can see a lot of pivotal moments and I think we might be living in a time more pivotal than the invention of the printing press. We now have more information available to us than ever before and we can be updated on what's happening in the world in real time, but on the other side of the coin we are being bombarded with information that is opinionated, false, or divisive. The information we are fed is delivered to us via algorithms which are built ro reinforce our own beliefs by feeding us things we agree with and things that infuriate us. The algorithms aren’t built with bad intentions but to ke...

When I think about social media one of the first things that pop into my mind is the word selfie. Pictures were a driving force in the evolution of social media. The reason that a program like Instagram dominates Facebook with the jet demographics is that Instagram has a cleaner and more streamlined way of displaying images to the consumer. Instagram is also a super popular app because it adopts/steals other prominent software ideas. You can see an example of this with their Instagram stories taken from Snapchat, and reels which adopt a Tik Tok type model. As long as it’s legal, I guess you can’t complain, but it does seem kind of sleepy to blatantly copy someone else’s hard work for your own benefit. Since Instagram has become a hodgepodge of the most popular aspects of other social media programs it’s become a one-stop shop for me to share funny videos, post what's going on in my life, etc. The only thing about Instagram that I don’t like is the culture of its users. Instagram se...

“I think that digital detox will become more prevalent this year, with many people trying to limit the amount of time they spend on social media.” (Lilach Bullock 2020, p183) Social media is a fairly new technology but I think humans are starting to understand how it is affecting us. I agree with the quote and I think we will start to see the trend of people who use or abstain from social media increase. We see the emergence of all sorts of apps and technologies to track the time we spend on it as well as blocking us from having access to the apps. Personally I try to be mindful of how much time on social media because the apps have gotten so good at capturing my attention. I think the fact that innovation has trended in this direction at all is concerning. Humans have never been connected to each other at this level and we see all sorts of reports about kids not having as many friends as they did in the past or less people in committed relationships. The vision that Meta has so far ha...

When I started reading this chapter I immediately started to think about the news I heard about Mr. Beast. He was offered 1 billion dollars for his youtube channel which may sound crazy until you break down the numbers. I just looked up his video views over the last 30 days and it was 1.027 billion views, his largest video was a squid games video which had 238 million views….which is more than double the superbowl. At the end of the day social media is all about numbers and where it started was how many people liked or even watched my post, but it seems like it has slowly changed into an ad cash cow. Social media influencers exist because of the amount of eyes they get on them and this correlates to potentially how many eyes a company can get on their product. Something else that stood out to me is how much social media has grown over the last 10 years. To me it seems like Instagram has been around forever but the fact that their users have increased from 1 to 2 billion users is crazy...

  My social media usage is pretty limited to Instagram at this point. When I was younger I also used twitter and snapchat pretty frequently but at this point it's mainly just Instagram. I was using snapchat this week to talk to a friend who I don't speak to usually. I think our friendship before revolved around snapchat as a messaging platform so it was almost as if we were falling back on old habits. I noticed that my Instagram usage is normally any downtime or break where I don’t have too much else to do. For example if I’m on break at work, walking somewhere, or using the bathroom. I would say the other major portion of Instagram usage is right before I go to sleep I will spend time scrolling through reels. I am about to graduate so I threw in my Handshake usage because I had gone in and updated my work experience as well as looked at some messages from recruiters. All of my social media usage takes place on my phone because it's significantly more convenient than a co...

      I define social media as any internet based platform  where a person or business can share/post information to the public or their own selected audience. Social networking is the connections that are made facilitating social media. The social media sites that I use regularly are Instagram, Snapchat, and LinkedIn. I have other social media apps on my phone but I don’t use them at all. I use Snapchat as a messaging app and Instagram to see what my friends are doing and share what I am doing as well. LinkedIn is used for networking and applying for jobs.      I use Snapchat and LinkedIn infrequently maybe once a week, but I am on Instagram multiple times a day. I feel like I have a fairly healthy relationship with social media and using it doesn’t affect how I feel about myself or others for the most part. One thing I would say is that I tend to spend too much time on social media which is a little unhealthy. Every week my phone sends me a report ...