Week 15: Digital Footprint

 When I think about my digital footprint I never thought about it being that big but it definitely is. I use social media every day whether that be sending emails or texts to check what other people are up to. Everything I do is kept track of and it can sound scary sometimes when you really think about it. I spend around probably half my day using technology so there definitely is a lot of information that has been built up. I use a few different social media websites but use some definitely more than others. 

Instagram was probably one of the first social media that I used because I loved to see what others were doing and let them know what interesting stuff was going on in my life. But as I grew older I didn’t seem to care about getting a lot of likes and also I didn’t care to see someone on a great vacation while I was in school. It is definitely a great application but I care more now about living my life instead of worrying about what others are doing with theirs. 

Snapchat is also another great application that I use a lot and I enjoy this application because it is mainly just used for communicating with people. I can talk to my close friends and see how they are doing. I typically use this application for 2 hours and 30 minutes a day. I can also get news from Snapchat and see what people are posting to their stories which are usually funny videos. 

Facebook I don't use at all anymore unless I’m trying to search someone up that I couldn’t find on Instagram. It’s not really as enjoyable as it used to be. I used to be very active on Facebook when I was younger but when I got older I saw how embarrassing some of the posts I was putting up so I had to get off the application.

Now I spend a lot of my time on Tik Tok because my girlfriend convinced me to get it. I enjoy this app because it is customized to the videos I enjoy watching. The reason it understands what I like is because of how I interact with the video. For example, if I like the video it will show me similar videos. After a while of using Tik Tok, I decided to create a video myself while I was fixing up our pool and posted a series of videos, and waited to see if a lot of people saw it. The next day I woke up I had 50,000 people that had viewed my video and by the end of the day, it had been at 500,000 thousand views. The video continued to grow and reached 3 million people. I thought about how crazy this was considering it had only been 3 days and 3 million people had seen my video. Now my video and my name and profile have been out there for 3 million people to see and search who I am. But that didn’t worry me at the time so I posted 2 more and got 3.1 and 1 million views on these videos. At the end of all of this, I had 45,000 followers. Now even though this was a very cool experience it’s scary how fast your information can spread on the internet. 

With all of these apps, I have given out my phone number and email which I never think about when creating an account. It was never taught to us in school how we should be careful while using the internet as kids and I think that is very important. I was always told by my family that I should be careful about what I post because it could come back to me in the future. Also, I most definitely think that social media can make people feel lonely and sad. When you think about what people post on social media it’s enjoyable things that are going on in their life. If someone just had a terrible breakup and is going on Instagram and sees all of their other friends posting about how they have such great relationships, it’s probably going to make them feel bad.  

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/05/is-facebook-making-us-lonely/308930/

https://techterms.com/definition/digital_footprint#:~:text=A%20digital%20footprint%20is%20a,trail%20you%20unintentionally%20leave%20online.