Psych Social Media Week 7

First up: I apologize about week 6. I was out of town for a wedding. I know being out of town doesn't actually prevent posting to a blog, which is kind of the beauty of blogging, BUT being so busy catching up with friends, celebrating, running errands with a bride-to-be, setting up for a wedding, attending the temple, flying, traveling, and exploring does prevent ones posting to a blog. It was so worth the time spent away from my phone and laptop. I loved living a little more "in the moment" over the weekend. That being said, I still found time to post to Instagram a few times. It's just so much quicker! A quick pic, flick through a couple filters, add a caption and BAM my mom is satisfied that I documented the trip. This week my group gave a presentation for our class about Instagram. I think that officially solidified good old Insta as my favorite medium of social media. Facebook is something I won't give up because I do enjoy reading articles and I usually find interesting articles that my friends have shared on Facebook. Instagram will still be the winner for me though, because I love the simplicity and the pretty pictures! Someone brought up the way it is a way of promoting a false sense of reality, but I love that we can add filters and make our pictures more beautiful. I think that turns it from just posting pictures to a sort of art, allowing us to be creative with our pictures while we edit them to get the right look. I wear little if any make-up on my actual face, so I reserve the right to edit my picture face with filters. I'll call it art.
Overall I'm glad I took this social media class. It helped me be a lot more aware of my social media usage. Conclusions for me now are that I'll stick to my two forms of social media for now. I'm considering adding Pinterest in once I start teaching full-time, but for now all I need is FB and Insta. I want to cut down the FB a bit also or at least think a little more before I click, some of the articles I end up reading definitely don't count as time well spent. Overall I recognize there are many positives to social media and I want to capitalize on those positives without getting sucked into the negatives. It will be a great balancing act.... kind of like everything else in life lol