Blog 8

    The time of the year that some kids have prayed for and other mourn is officially here. It is the end of the school year, or in my case, the end of the semester. I am a part of the group that is mourning this time of the year because once this semester ends, I will be finished with my undergraduate studies. There is no going back to college after this for me. Come August, I will be diving into the big girl world at my new job in Fredericksburg with Geico. The mourning of the end approaching started early this year. The seniors’ time on campus was cut short due to the coronavirus pandemic, and we were forced to move home and face reality sooner than we thought. We are now doing homework in isolation rather than making our last few college memories with friends. One homework assignment I have been tasked with for this semester is to tweet a minimum of once daily about social media while using the hashtag #cnusocialmedia.

    The assignment was intimidating at first because I never post on Twitter. Twitter was the one social media app that I scrolled through and enjoyed the content but was never a content creator. Also, I decided to use my personal twitter account rather than making a school account, which forced me to try and create content that would appeal to my original following while also meeting the class requirements. In an attempt to please both fan bases, I was forced to brainstorm what to tweet rather than using my first initial ideas. Some individuals unfollowed me due to the social media-related tweets while others stuck along for the ride as they would often favorite my tweets with the hashtag.
    The challenges of this homework assignment continued as there were also about 20 other students in this course section that were tweeting about the same content. I am an individual that likes to be original and produce new material rather than tweet on the same topics that I see others posting about. As hard as I tried to create original content, the reality is that often, my tweets were similar in subject to my classmates. This is the part of the homework assignment that I often felt that I was coming up short.
    Although the homework assignment did have challenges, there were also benefits to it. I never tweeted on Twitter because when I was younger, I overshared on the platform. I was too young to have social media, and once I realized I was oversharing, I told myself I wouldn’t tweet at all. Even now, about seven years later, I was still fearful of creating content. This homework assignment allowed me to get over my fear of posting content on Twitter. Now that I am older, I am now more aware of what is appropriate and inappropriate to post, and I even found myself posting more tweets than just the required by this course.
   

After getting over my fear of posting on Twitter, I found myself going beyond the homework assignment requirements. I usually would try to interact with other social media posts in addition to creating my post. I also found myself retweeting way for than the required ten a week. At a certain point early on in the semester, it no longer felt like a homework assignment. When pulling up Twitter, I felt that I was getting on the platform for personal reasons. I had an alarm set for 7 pm Monday through Friday to remind me to tweet, and there were only a handful of times that I had not done by tweet for the day by that time. I enjoyed being able to interact with my classmates every day.
    I would give myself about 45/50 points for the tweeting assignment. I tweeted every day I was supposed to. I put thought and effort into the majority of my tweets. I went above and beyond by occasionally tweeting more than once a day. I attempted to interact with other classmates’ posts. I retweeted the ten required retweets a week with often going beyond that. I deducted points for myself because although the majority of the time, I put a great deal of effort into my tweets, I know there were a few times I slacked off. I am human, and on busier weeks that I was drowning in assignments, I found myself tweeting the first thing that came to mind rather than putting deeper thought into it. Additionally, I never counted my retweets, which leaves me at risk for possibly not hitting the required ten retweets.
    I hope this course continues to make this homework assignment a requirement. Coming into this, I dreaded the idea of tweeting every day, and now that I am leaving the course, I am going to miss it. I may not be using the #cnusocialmedia or tweeting every day, but I will continue to use Twitter. I think it would be interesting in the future to open up the tweets to be about anything or even possibly alternate weeks from social media related posts to anything. Possibly, offer extra credit to students if any of their tweets hit a certain number of favorites or retweets to encourage them to put more effort into their content. I once saw a Tik Tok where an individual posted a video on how her boyfriend cheated with her best friend that blew up, and she stated “like” for a part two. In part two, she said it was a class assignment to show what kind of content individuals make go viral on social media. Social media is a powerful tool, and this assignment helped me learn that.