Eclectic Interests (From Food to Shows)

Does social media foster connection? Or does it encourage separation? Sometimes it's hard to tell. Through Facebook, you can keep connections with people from your hometown, mission, or classes. It can also be a way for you to connect with someone in class. Instagram can be a natural way for you to send memes or reels to a friend. Twitter (or X) can allow you to spread news.  But, these apps can also suck you into hours of scrolling.  Clearly, the separating factor in this is how we use it. Here is some unsolicited advice for what I have tried to help me keep social media social. Set a time limit for how long you can use apps. If you want to use it longer you can, but it is a reminder that can stop the doom scrolling. (15 minutes is a good starting point.) Open an app with one of three purposes: see how a specific friend is doing or check up generally on everyone or to look for something entertaining. Acknowledge what the purpose is. Before scrolling reels, decide before han...

I have been reflecting on many of the topics in class recently: health concerns, sex and the media, family and the media, and advertising. I wanted to apply what I have been learning by setting up some "technological walls" (I need a better term for that). I wanted to limit the types of ads I could see and the possibility that I would run into sexual images. Have you ever been looking for memes on Instagram and then several of them use offensive language? Or an ad on YouTube which you know you didn't look up earlier? I have often accepted them as a fact of using the online world. But those are the exact scenarios that this week I have attempted to cut out. I began by going into my Instagram settings. I have not looked too deeply at them before today. It had many more features than I expected. You can control much of what you see! Here are the settings I changed: In content preferences I: Enabled show less sensitive content Added a filter to filter out posts with certain e...