Hello World

While in Mississippi leading a youth group on a service trip two weeks ago I paused at one point to think about the consequences of taking a week off of school and work. Mainly I decided (as I had before the trip) that my COPACE professors are so amazing (they might be reading this so I need to suck up) and my bosses had enough people to distribute the work amongst that there would be no major consequence. The main issue I have faced is getting all the work that I missed done, especially when there is the Internet that is so perfect for procrastination.

So of course I tried to do my work and was consumed with an urge to do everything but my homework, but I always feel better when I procrastinate in a slightly productive manor so I started looking at how different organizations that I am involved in are represented in social media which was almost like doing a social media monitoring assignment I have. Looking at how the group I went to Mississippi with had viral videos and how my internship had a large presence on Facebook made me think, how does this change how we perceive things?

Social media is now so pervasive in our daily lives we don’t step back and think about it any more. We accept the continuous updates and people snap and upload pictures all around us without blinking an eye.

But what if we didn’t immediately know about Whitney Houston’s death or that what you just saw on the Academy Awards was a wardrobe malfunction. In Mississippi parents had an idea of what was going on through the videos and didn’t need to wait a week until their children came home. Also in Mississippi the kids I was with did not have their cell phones and had a hard time not being able to quickly look up an answer to whatever questions arose.

While it may be nice to get the updates that we do it can also cause some harm. I know when I went on trips like the one to Mississippi I loved telling my parents about it, and I could in great detail because they had no idea what I had just experienced. They could never have said that they knew about my work site and had seen it in a video. It all just leaves me wondering if we are loosing interpersonal connections through all the social media. While the tweeting and the posting wont stop, we can remember to ask the people around us what is going on rather than just read about it on their Facebook page