Growing up apart of Gen Z, I’ve been surrounded by the internet and technology throughout the entirety of my life. It’s always been an easily accessible way to pass time and connect to others, without having to move far from the couch. However, as i’ve gotten older and matured, the way that I use social media and what social media platforms I use has completely changed.
At the age of 8, I received an ipod which became my very first personal device. On this I would watch youtube and create short musical videos with my older cousins that I would post on the app. Although, it wasn’t until the ages of 11-12 where i started to download apps such as snapchat, instagram and vine and use them to connect with my friends and family. Instagram quickly became my most used platform though, with me posting upto 6 posts per day, updating my followers on what I was doing at the time.
Whilst embarrassing to me now, I posted selfies, edits, photos of one direction (of course), photos of my friends and family and reposts of images I found on other apps such as pinterest. I was obsessed with posting and gained over 3,000 followers after having the app for around a year. After a while though, I slowly began to get sick of posting everything all the time and wanted to switch it up with an aesthetically pleasing feed, so I abandoned my account and created the one that I still have to this day.
Around the age of 12, I was apart of a youtube account with 5 other girls where we would each post a video once a week that correlated to a specific theme. We all had our own day of the week that we would post our video on and we each had to come up with a concept every week for our video. This was a fun way for me to make friends whilst using social media, as the girls in the group were from all around the world, and it was an outlet for me to demonstrate my creative side. But the group didn’t last very long and we parted ways to do our separate things.
In 2016, I created an instagram account to exhibit edits that I had created from photos of celebrities and influences. At the time, I had plenty of spare time and decided to create fun and bright edits of people that I looked up to. Whilst I did this for fun, I also did this to try and get recognised by celebrities as I wanted them to see that colourful edits that I had created for them. I would tag celebrities, follow other instagram accounts that had the same niche, use plenty of hashtags and engage with my followers to try and gain a large audience and more engagement on my edits. I created two separate accounts from 2016-2017 for my edits but was inconsistent with posting as I was more motivated to post at some periods of time more that others, until I stopped posting all together.
Today, I am constantly using my phone and social media, sometimes a little too much. My most used apps include snapchat, instagram, facebook and TikTok, which I constantly switch between. Snapchat is definitely my dominate social media platform to connect and communicate with others, which i’ve used the same way for almost a decade. Instagram on the other hand, is now used to stalk others lives and see that they are upto through the images they post, with me only posting once every 6 months. Facebook and TikTok are mostly used by me just scrolling through and looking at the content posted such as news and funny videos and occasionally sending it to or tagging some in it that i know. Twitter is also a social media site that i recently joined when coming to university as it was needed for one of my classes and now have been trying to use for news and keeping up to date with my class.
As I have gotten older and society has changed, my use of social media has changed also. I’ve used most of the same platforms for years, but the way that I’ve used them has altered. Looking back on some of the things i used to upload to social media makes me cringe and embarrassed, but it’s all apart of growing up and learning and finding who I am.
Bibliography
Smith, S and Watson, J 2014, ‘Virtually Me: A Toolbox about Online Self-Presentation’, in Poletti, A and Rak, J (eds.), Identity Technologies: Constructing the Self Online, The University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, pp. 70-95
hannahbrookss.wordpress.com 