It all Comes Back to Social Media

Sadly, we are coming to the end of the semester. Two hours from now I will be sitting in in LB 125 eating breakfast, watching a video, and soaking up the last morsels of new testable material. But for me, it all comes back to social media, and the material we practically began this course with.

Why does it all come back to social media? Is it because that was the first thing on the syllabus that I connected with? Is it that my project group chose social media as our topic? Maybe. It's possible, but I don't think so. That's not the whole story.

I am a self proclaimed comm nerd. This Wednesday when Dr. Messner showed  a YouTube video  called "Google Exodus," I tweeted it to #bsupop out immediately after class. The next day I posted the light hearted view of what Mosses would have done with the internet at his fingers to my sister's Facebook wall, adding the comment "proof social media has changed how humans communicate."

I was amused further when my group members were sitting around my kitchen table working on our social media project and conversation seemingly grind-ed to a halt because in our attempt to search social media sites for an academic purpose we had fallen victim to Facebook's call to log in and tune out.

I remember making the point during a class discussion about social media use, that social media such as Facebook and Twitter, were tools, and people should view them as little more than that, a tool to be used when it's appropriate. Now, feeling a little hypocritical, I admit that my social media use has greatly increased thanks to the creation of my twitter account and the choice to use this topic for my group's project. Spoiler Alert! Our group is even diving into Pintrist for the sake of our video presentation. Before you laugh too hard at the expense of my mildly addictive personality you should think twice.

In an article printed in Newsweek in July of this year (2012) Tony Dokoupil wrote about social media and some alarming peer reviewed research that is finally starting to leak out about the social media generation. Among the info that is given attention by Dokoupil's article is that social media use is leading to the increase in ADD and ADHD. Perhaps even more shocking, Dokoupil points out that there is research that shows that someone who is addicted to the internet has a practically identical brain scan to someone who is addicted to heroin.

After Thanksgiving my group of social media addicts will turn in a project putting down the very tool that temporarily froze our productivity more times this semester than I can count. At the conclusion of this semester I vow to do a social media cleanse. Comm 322 has been an awesome course. I am sad to see it go, but the cliche holds true, "All good things must come to an end."