I was personally a late adopter of social media. Although I used MSN messenger and email to correspond with my friends, it took them over a year of determined insistence before I yielded and let them set me up with a Facebook account, long after everyone else had already adopted it. I only joined Instagram and Pintrest within the last two years, and I still haven’t been won over to joining Snapchat. I’ve had a Twitter account for ages, but I only use it to lurk and keep up to date with the witty repartee of my favourite authors. The only form of social media I actively engaged with early on was blogging – on both WordPress and Blogger –  but even that was a transitory pastime, as I used my blog as a travel journal to keep friends and family members updated while I was on exchange – and promptly stopped updating as soon as I returned home.

Currently, Facebook is the social media platform I use most actively, and there I am a fairly cautious user, only adding people I know and genuinely want to interact with as friends, having layers of filtering so that only the people I want to share information with receive that information, and most of the time setting up my account so that it is invisible to searches.  Having become even more aware about some of the privacy and copyrights issues surrounding information shared on Facebook and Instagram in particular through my classes at SLAIS I have become even more cautious a user of late. Continue reading →