New New Media and Where I Stand

I was one of the last of my friends to embrace new new media. Back when Facebook became open to the public, I was attending middle school. My dad, a very tech-savvy man who had been on the internet since its conception, had raised me with an extremist outlook on internet security. No one online is who they say they are, everyone is after you, trust no one. While this rhetoric kept me from revealing my personal information online, it also kept me from seeing the potential positives that this emerging form of media had to offer. Stories of underage children being picked up by middle-aged men via MySpace only reinforced my negative views on the topic. I refuted every invite my friends sent me to Facebook, explaining that I didn’t want to be an entry in some would-be rapist’s shopping catalog.

  The Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Tumblr, Reddit, LinkedIn, and all the other accounts I now hold in my name show that I’ve experienced a change of heart.

I couldn't tell you what brought about that change in attitude, but I can accept now that the extremes I was taught as a child may have been a little, well, extreme. I joined Facebook during my Freshman year of High School, back in 2007…which is 6 years ago. I went from an avid hater of the service to someone who can’t go a day without checking my feed or refreshing my wall. Facebook Messenger has become one of my main tools for communication, both while at my desk and on the go via my smartphone. It has become both a viable tool for communication and my social link to many people I have never met in person. 

My Twitter follows a similar story. I hated the idea of Twitter at it’s first appearance in my life. I made an account to see what the buzz was about, but quickly abandoned it. It was like Facebook, minus everything that made Facebook useful. But my understanding of Twitter grew as the site’s popularity did. I had first used it to follow artists and musicians I liked. I didn’t really embrace it or even check it regularly until I went to a party and had people who were then strangers asking for my twitter handle. This was around 2011. I’m now following 400 people and have 220 people following me, assuming most of those aren’t spam bots. I’ve had casual conversations with people I idolized via twitter, fueled and read heated debates spread across multiple 140-character tweets, and been kept current on major world events all from the comfort of some silly little webpage. 

I’ve spent most of my life being socially awkward. I was never the one to initiate hang-outs, and favored tagging along with groups to making new friends. These last few years, however, I’ve found myself branching out—meeting people, going places, being generally adventurous. Society seems to think that a life socializing through computer screens limits us and chains us to a meek life indoors. In my case, the people I’ve met online and keep in contact with through New New Mediums have not only helped me to branch out socially, but have helped me to really look and define who I am in this world of ours.