On Monday, I participated in a research study. This was not your average, answer-these-three-questions-please-to-save-my-grade type of survey you see plastered all over Facebook.
This survey was legit. I went in a room, sat down in a comfy chair and answered questions — in person — for an hour or so.
I went in expecting it to be a bit boring and mostly computer-generated, but I couldn’t have been more wrong. The whole thing was actually really fun and more than a little eye-opening.
I got to talk at length, with no interruptions or judgement, about something I never realized I was passionate about before that day.
That something is #socialmedia.
Before you sigh, call me an extremely basic 20-something-year-old girl and move on, just hear me out.
I’ve always known I like social media. I’m a public relations major, and it kind of comes with the (multiple) job descriptions.
I have a Twitter, a Facebook and a Wordpress blog. I hit up Snapchat on the regular, adore my Instagram despite my meager followings and spazz daily about things I see on Pinterest. I spend long hours procrastinating on Tumblr.
I’ve done it all.
But nearly all of these platforms were things I started playing with mostly because everyone else around me was also playing with them, and I think that is kind of the norm with social media.
This semester, I’ve really thrown myself into the occasionally shallow — though always shiny — world of online self-promotion; I’m taking a social media management class.
Don’t laugh.
The class has already taught me a lot, not the least of which was that this stuff is actually kind of hard.
At least, it’s hard if you want to actually engage with people, not just complain about #firstworldproblems.
You don’t get Twitter famous overnight, and those "influencers" who have two million-plus followers on Instagram are probably using a lot of the skill sets my social media management class is learning now.
Adults like to sigh at the multitude of different social media platforms that are out there for kids to play with now, but there is a reason there are more than one billion people on Facebook now and nearly 316 million on Twitter, and it’s not that we like to take selfies.
It’s that social media is one of the biggest and most influential steps in human communication to come around in ages.
Social media means a more interconnected world, a smaller world.
We learn more about each other, we see more and we discuss more. Things happen because of social media.
These things can be as small as a business connecting a little more personally with its customers and as big as raising money for those facing unspeakable hardships, such as the funds that have come from the hearts of people who follow Humans of New York on Facebook.
The survey I took wasn’t really the start of me realizing I really like this kind of thing, but it was the tipping point.
However stereotypical it might be as a PR girl to get really into hashtagging, I need to believe that social media is kind of a big deal.
It will outlast the criticism it gets from the long-suffering parents who just want their kids to get off the phone. In most cases, it already has.
Social media is fun, and like most things that are fun, it’s also a tool.
It's a tool for communication and self-expression, a way to build an identity.
If there is one thing we’ve always liked to do, it’s re-create ourselves.
Hashtagging, tweeting and snapchatting are all ways of tapping into the undercurrents of conversation that lie underneath most things we like to talk about, whether it’s social commentary, political involvement or imagination.
For having such a technologically based existence, social media is a pretty darn human creation.
TL;DR: Social media is pretty great and does more than we know for helping to curate human existence as we currently know it.
Next time you’re kicking around on Twitter, think about that.
Sally Grieder is a UF English and public relations junior. Her column appears on Wednesdays.
