Final Project Reflection

Now that this project is over, I’m going to come clean: honestly, I have never really been a fan of social media. Facebook is fun to check but having conversations that anyone can read is weird. It takes too much energy to censor everything you say on a friend’s wall but I’m not willing to risk the consequences of having the wrong person see thing wrong thing. Admittedly, I’ve never tried Twitter but it sounds ridiculous. I don’t know anyone who would care to read 160 character updates of my life; if someone wants to know what I’m doing, they can ask. It just goes downhill after that. Out of curiosity, I tried Chatroulette. Luckily, I didn’t run into any creepy old men…all I got was a black screen. (Sidenote: It started working a minute after I typed this…I got a couple of middle schoolers, a man with tattoos who worked in corporate finance and asked me to “show your tits”, and two flashers before I gave up. I liked the black screen better. Much better.) Maybe my aversion to social media is because of my complete inability to use technology or maybe it is because of the massive abuse of social media that occurs today. Regardless, I was less than excited when I heard that a major component of our final project would be the use of social media. Throughout the project, I found that social media would prove to be extraordinarily useful but also extremely frustrating.

Without social media, mainly Facebook, it would have been impossible for us to finish our project. It was a place for us to discuss the reality show with each other, remind people to bring costumes, keep track of daily activities, share what we were working on, and post pictures and videos of our successes. We managed to utilize the messages, groups, discussions, and picture and video uploading features of Facebook. Looking at the MOMA page really helped. It was a bit of an unobtainable goal, since I’m sure the MOMA hires publicity people to run their Facebook page, but it showed us how to use the technology we had to our advantage. In theory, the whole thing sounds perfect. However, Facebook didn’t organize us quite as well as I had hoped. Since we were relying on Facebook as our main source of communication, this made the project much more difficult. I couldn’t help but wonder if the problem was with the technology itself or with us. Some aspects of Facebook really bothered me…it was hard to format the posts so that they were easy to read (I got so tired of clicking “see more” at the bottom of each post) and uploading the video itself was tricky.

There were definitely mistakes on our part too though. Not everyone checked Facebook; it was common for someone to come to school and have no idea what we were working on. When they asked, the information was often on Facebook. Personally, that was a big surprise for me. I assumed that people would check the Media and Society page when ever they went on Facebook but in retrospect, it seems clear that our class did not really want to mix business with pleasure. When people checked Facebook, they went on to look at their friend’s pictures and maybe send a funny YouTube link, not to do school work. We weren’t perfect at putting information on Facebook either; not everyone updated what they were working on. Understandably so, some groups would get so caught up in whatever they were working on that they would completely forget to record it. However, this was one thing that I feel we improved on as time went by. At the beginning, it was very strange to keep a record of what we did in class and of what we were planning on doing the next day. The more we did it, the better we got. It definitely took us a while to find our roles in the group but once a group of people started regularly updating the Facebook page, it became much more comprehensive and representative of our project.

Using social media for a school project was a new experience for me and in general, I wouldn’t call it a positive one. Don’t get me wrong, social media definitely has its place. It can be fun and can be used to spread information if used right. However, when used wrong (i.e. Chatroulette), it can be a disaster. For this reason, I do not feel it is appropriate for use in a work or school context. It is also hard to use something that is usually meant for entertainment for educational or business purposes; it is always tempting to stop working and to use it for fun. Technology that is used mainly for communication works much more effectively. Using social media in this respect is also difficult because you never really get a break. All of a sudden, something that had always been relaxing and fun is being used to do work. Recently, I was at a Challenge Success meeting and one of the middle school teachers brought up the need to have time away from work or school. She said that she does not check her email from Friday afternoon to Sunday morning and she encourages her coworkers to do the same. I really liked this idea of having a separation between personal time and work time. Advancements in technology make this separation even harder. Thanks to the iPhone, I have gotten emails from some teachers at two in the morning. I feel that our challenge now is to maintain a separation between business and pleasure, between our personal lives and our public lives. Some day, employees may be expected to check their Facebook daily and update their boss on their work. We have to make an effort now to make sure that the technology we use for entertainment stays separate from the technology we use to do work.