Blog #8

      This blog is going to be all about introspection for the last three months. Twitter: how did I approach Tweeting; did I enjoy doing it daily; exactly how engaged was I in the process; did I learn any shocking truths about social media along the way; do I feel any differently having a larger social media presence than before? I'd like to answer all of these questions and come up with a few more along the way. I don't think I'll be referencing any readings for this blog since I'm seeing it as mostly a self reflective blog post - which also means I'll need to get creative with images - but that's just me.
      Let's start with what I originally thought of Twitter and posting on social media in general and then we can cover how I feel now after the process of Tweeting at least once a (week)day. I was very much the Shubam (from The Circle) persona before this class, but more in the way that I enjoyed social media, just not as someone who posts content there. I think I had always been told growing up, "Be extremely careful about what you post on social media because you never know when it will here. I still remember one of my Freshman suitemates trying to explain why I should have Snapchat. I was just so incredibly confused on when I would ever want to send someone a random picture that they didn't ask for of either my face or wherever I was. Selfies as a thing barely made any sense to me, probably because my self esteem on personal looks was rather low until around Sophomore year in college. So needless to say, going into this class, while I was a little more social media savvy, I wasn't an "influencer" with thousands of people following my accounts.
come back to bite you," and to me I guess that just translated to, "Don't post anything ever." So I wasn't a big sharer. I think I didn't even have an Instagram account until Freshman year of college, and even then I only posted sporadically, say, once a month? If you want to see my account for any reason, probably to see how sparse the content is and also what content was posted, you'll find it
       After all the Tweeting, my current opinions on social media are... eh? Certainly not unchanged, but I'm definitely not going to be doing a complete 180 and posting breakfast pics for people to judge my quarantine omelette. Tweeting at the start was definitely easier than later on, though. I found in the beginning there were a lot of initial thoughts and comments I had, that the first 3-4 weeks were pretty easy when it came to coming up with something to say. After that, I started looking online for something a little more insightful - articles and the like to bring to peoples' attention. After quarantine hit though? Well, it got harder to Tweet about social media itself. Twitter became more a means of talking about how social media and Covid-19 connected (i.e. social media lets us do stuff in quarantine and stay connected). Still, that only lasted about a week before I felt I needed to talk about something else. So it was strange Tweeting about how I was trying to do anything that wasn't social media - while engaging with social media.
       I honestly think I'd be doing a disservice here to not talk about all my social media usage during the quarantine as well. Despite quarantine and campus closing happening in the last 1/3 of the semester, it's taken up a lot of our focus as students and professors, so I definitely think it warrants a message here in my reflection. During quarantine, I have barely even looked at Instagram. This goes back to my very first blog post where I explained that Instagram was a time waster that I use when I'm "in transit" or waiting for something: be it in a line, for class, or something else. Due to the quarantine, I'm always home, always capable of starting my work whenever, and generally not in need of a time waster. And because I'm home, I don't need Instagram in the evenings as I'm using other things - books, calling friends, video games - to wind down. That's not to say my phone screen time went down. If anything, it went up. I listen to lots of podcasts and playthroughs of various games for entertainment and white noise while I work, and being home just allowed me to leave those running while I went about my everyday tasks, from cleaning to schoolwork. So my YouTube usage went way up, but Snapchat, Instagram, and Twitter were incredibly small in terms of how much I used them or looked at them. Mostly, I only opened them when I had to: a friend shared something with me and I got a notification, or I had to Tweet for class.
       I do want to focus back on Twitter, since that's primarily what this reflection is trying to measure, and I think the best way to do that is by talking about the most significant experience I had while Tweeting for this class. Yes, I'm talking about the one Tweet where I used the GamerGate hashtag (which can be found here). That was... an experience. I didn't expect it to garner any real attention,

and mostly just used the hashtag because that's what we were talking about. Little did I know that trolls still trundle on through that hashtag looking to tell people we need to be more misogynistic or that "GamerGate had nothing to do with women." Which... is a hot take. But I want to focus in on my personal reaction to this because it was and also wasn't what I expected, and I find that interesting. When the Tweet started "blowing up" (my average Tweets for our class garnered almost 100 views. This one topped 1,000), I felt needlessly nervous, as if I had broken some kind of rule. As you might imagine, lots of people commenting on your post that you're wrong or thoroughly misinformed, and other people liking those posts, will give that effect. And, thinking back on it now, had I known that hashtag would garner so much attention, I probably would have worded the Tweet differently so that a discussion might have been possible (it's possible that some of the people commenting just liked the current trajectory of games and view most public outcry as yellow journalism at this point). That said, I did do some snooping on the profiles of those that commented, and yeah no, these guys are garbage bags. Usually old men in their 40s to 50s with bios that read, "I've been playing video games since gallaga and I'm tired of all these tweens and their sissy culture." So I felt better after reading that, funnily enough, because it meant that the opinions of these people were nothing to me.
      There is a big but to put in here though because there were two emotions that I felt when I saw all the comments, views, and likes jumping around that post. One was the obvious, "Oh Christ, what have I done?" The other, however, was the more subtle, "Wow, this is the most viewership I've ever gotten on a post! If they didn't all hate it, this would feel pretty good." And even though they did all hate it, it still felt pretty good to open Twitter and see three more comments on something I had written; that there had been an effect. So from that I can tell that if I did start posting a lot more - maybe some of the maps I make for tabletop games, or story ideas I have when writing creatively -  I could get that same feeling, but better. In short, that somewhat tragic incident with me Tweeting something lots of people hated helped me realize that I do actually like seeing people talking about something I posted - good or bad. That, and the easiest way to get something trending is probably to piss off the most people with it, which is exactly why Trump is so popular on Twitter. Guess he figured that one out first.