I believe that social media is most definitely contributing to a culture of meaningful connection and meaningful learning at the same time I also do believe that it contributes to a superficial culture of connections and content due to the constant need for reassurance caused by social media networks.Social media provides a multitude of platforms that allow users to share, connect, post, and create content that can be viewed and enjoyed. Because of this social media has gained tremendous traction in society and it has become apart of most people’s everyday life. While browsing on different social media networks, I can say that a majority of the time I see genuine and positive content being posted by people I follow and pages I am associated with. One good thing about social media is that for the most part you can control what you are seeing on your timelines and platforms. Sometimes people you may follow might post something that is not what you would like to see but you can unfollow or block users who do this. While social media has many positives and provides a space for meaningful connections, it also does the same for negative and meaningless interactions as well. While using social media platforms it is important to understand that everything you see has an effect on you whether you realize it or not so it is vital that you control what you see as much as you can so you are feeding into the positive meaningful side of social media more than the negative. To ensure that social media is fostering a culture of meaningful connections, you can personally do your part by only posting and sharing content that contributes to this. If you run into content that does the opposite, you simply remove or block those posts. This course is not the first time I have looked at social media and it’s impacts in depth so I would not say that my views about social media are changing or shifting. I would say that being in this course definitely causes me to think about social media in depth on a daily basis and I am constantly becoming aware of my interaction and activity on my socials. Unfortunately for me I am in a position where I need to have certain social media platforms even though I would rather not. Because I am not a huge fan of social media, I find it easier to remove myself from it when I feel that I am getting too caught up in it and I think that all social media platforms should enforce a mandatory break for all people and accounts so that they are able to reset and remember what it is like to live without socials.
