Social Media- Time Wasted?

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The social media experiment in this class has kind of taken my life for a loop.  If you read my initial post you will know that I have limited my social media use for personal reasons.  I don't like the pressure of following and posting.  I am the chair of a social media committee, believe it or not and I see my job as purely organizational.  My little team and I have created a social media calendar schedule posts using Buffer. 

I am down the rabbit hole.  I knew this would happen as soon as I opened myself up and it did.  I have wasted countless hours this week on social media and can't put that on my participation log.  Now that my husband sees me on Instagram he feels the need to "send" me memes and posts.  People like a post or pic and I get the notification for that so I have to view it.  Those of you who are in control out there can say, "turn your notifications off" but think about how many times you posted something and wanted to see how many people "liked" it.  It can become an obsession.

  The Addiction Resource Center even classifies it as Social Media Addiction. I am not that extreme (thank goodness) but it made me wonder about social media and education.  Are we feeding into the addiction when we start requiring students to join our groups and immerse themselves? 

Think about that for a moment.  I'm going to turn off my phone and see what happens.

Comments

  1. VanessaJuly 25, 2018 at 3:10 PM

    Interesting question you ask there. I like to flip it around. Social media is present whether we require it to be used for a class or not. However, as educators we can try to channel that use toward productive and educative venues and also (tacit objective here) help students learn how to manage their social media access.

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  2. LeahJuly 29, 2018 at 10:59 AM

    So true! It will exist regardless of how we use it. Teaching them (and ourselves) how to use social media effectively, when to set boundaries, and when it can do harm might be how we avoid the addiction. I do agree though that going from no social media to posting or at least checking in multiple times a day changes you. I don't know about you, but I think I'll be taking that 24-hour technology break sometime next weekend!

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