I'm Senja, a student of radiography and radiotherapy at Oulu University of Applied Sciences. Right now I'm participating a course called "Social media as a tool for working communities" in which we must write a blog to document all the learning assigments we get. This blog entry is the first of many social media-related posts to come. I used to blog for a while back in the day, so I decided to be lazy and just use my old blog template for this course task (I just hid all of the old posts..). So that's why the name of the blog is vivacious visions! I don't know how I came up with that a few years back but I guess it describes social media a little, right? No? Ok.
I use social media a lot. I mean A LOT. As early as in primary school I used sites as IRC-Galleria and ii2. Though I guess back then the phrase social media wasn't as popular yet. In 2008 I joined Facebook and have been there ever since. I also use Instagram, Snapchat, Tumbrl, Musically and many more. I follow several "youtubers" basically every day. I used to read a lot of blogs and as I said earlier wrote one myself too, but nowadays it's not the most interesting platform for me anymore.
For me social media is about entertaiment and finding information. Specially Facebook is a great way for companies and individuals to promote themselves and offer easily accessible info. Even though I use many social media platforms I usually don't produce any content myself (not right now at least), I just consume. Maybe I'm a kind of stalker in that way. Social media makes it so easy to interact with friends, family and other people fast and free, especially when you have all the apps in your phone.
Of course social media is all not rainbows and butterflies. Through social media sites it's so much easier to bully anonymously. There can also be data protection problems, since some platforms are pretty easy to hack into - nowadays many celebrities are constantly being hacked for example in Twitter. There's also a lot of talk surrounding kids and their overexcessive use of phones and computers. Even though I look at social media in pretty positive light, I do understand why many think it's a big bad wolf. Some people (children and adults) post the most bizarre things to the internet for creepers and even employers to see. The urge to share everything in social media might cause problems in the social and health care in particular, since professional secrecy binds all of the professions. I'm very interested to see and learn how social media can be safely used in my job.
