Social Media Audit

It is sometimes strange to think that there was a time that if you did not know the answer to something, you would have to rely on either asking someone else or go to a library to discover the answer. Now with the power of search engines, such as Google, information is at your fingertips and it has become more and more accessible across the world. Along with Google and social media giants, such as Facebook and Twitter, it has allowed users to stay connected and share content so easily. However, like it was outlined in the Lifewire article with this power comes many negative aspects, such as fake news and cyberbullying. This is why during university when Facebook was becoming more popular, I was always so conscious of what I posted and how much I was willing to share online because it was a scary thought that whatever you put out there on the ethernet was permanent and could not be taken back. Therefore, when I googled my name for this activity, I was not surprised to see that I could not find anything related to me in the search results. This could also be due to the fact that my last name is extremely common and so there were many results to go through.

I am a part of Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat to stay connected with my family and close friends, however I am not very active in terms of posting personal pictures or what is going on in my life. I tend to use these platform to directly share with the specific people that I am close with. In terms of who I follow, on platforms like Instagram, I enjoy following local food bloggers to see cool and tasty places in the city to add to my “must try list” and I also follow celebrities that I like to see the new movies, music, or comedy shows that they are currently promoting. I guess you can call me a social media lurker in that I do not post much myself, but I observe others that post. This always goes back to the idea of privacy and how I worry about my personal information being out there for the public to see. However, with this first unit in this course, it has started to make me really think about my professional presence online as I do want to explore my role as a future clinical researcher. And since, research is so collaborative by nature, I feel I have to become more comfortable with publicly sharing, especially with research findings. This is why I have to strike that balance of having a professional profile that will hold me to professional standards and benefit from the positive uses of social media to expand my research by collaborating with others in the field.