You probably wouldn’t know it by looking at me because I appear to be your average 
American that is up to date with the coolest trends, but I have avoided social media. I actually refused to get a myspace, Facebook, twitter, and even linkedIn, because I didn’t think that it fit who I was. It seemed weird to me that random people who I didn’t know could look at my personal information and never actually meet me. I also was rarely on the computer to keep all these social media outlets updated, so everything added up for me that social media wasn’t for me.
When I had my first Chicana Feminism class and Proffessor Perez told us that we HAD to blog and get a twitter account to tweet, I was kind of blown away because I was being forced to break my silent protest against social media. Another huge problem that I had with social media, especially tweeting, is that as soon as you send out a tweet, it is permanently out their in the twitter verse for everyone to see. My worst fear was that I was very worried that I would tweet something that would be taken as offensive to someone, and I wouldn’t be able to take it back! Once you tweet something offensive, it is worse than saying something offensive to someone because if you say something offensive to someone, you can at least say you misspoke and apologize instantly. If you tweet something offensive, so many people can be offended, and seems their is an automatic assumption that you tweeted with malicious intent. Since so many athletes, even in college basketball, have gotten in great trouble because of something offensive they tweeted that they probably didn’t give much thought to, I didn’t want to even put myself at risk of joining such a club since I was a collegiate athlete.
Once I started tweeting and blogging, it turned out to not be bad at all, I was able to get over most of my concerns I had before. I also really liked how the Chicana Feminism class had our own small community when we followed and commented on each others tweets. It was a great way to stay connected with your classmates, especially if you don’t have their numbers. Since you get a chance to see the opinions of your fellow classmates on twitter and on the blog post, you feel more of a familiarity towards them, than you would if you just seen them in class. However, you still have to be extremely cautious as to how you present your information when you blog especially, because it is taken more serious than a tweet, since our blogs for the class is representing basically the views of the class, as well as LMU. I was still also very cautious with my tweets because I don’t know who is looking at my tweets, so it was very important for me to be “politically correct” when I tweeted, so i wouldn’t offend anybody. Overall I thought my tweeting and blogging in the class helped me get introduced to the social media world, and I can see myself using it in the future. Thank you Professor Perez!