Social Media In Our Class

Getting a Twitter account and a blog account on the WordPress associated blog was interesting simply because it was related to an academic course. I have never had a twitter before but I understood the format and how to use it since websites that use personal publishing interfaces are mostly similar.


I avoided twitter because I felt that it was an extra internet tool that I did not need because of my facebook, blogspot, deviantart, (soon to come) linkedin, etc… that I’ve already had. But I have wondered about it simply because of the way professionals use it. I like the fact that it promotes quick, casual interaction without knowing someone’s hometown or seeing last night’s party pictures. I know lots of professionals from the animation industry and from film in general who take great advantage of Twitter. For example, for the making of the live action film, The Last Airbender (2010) (and it was terrible, I know), I followed the producer’s feed and his updates on the progress of the film which was a great way to follow the progression of such a project. Thus I was not really bothered by the idea of signing up although I had never sought to do it on my own. I know I’ll definitely keep mine and will likely continue posting with the CHST404 hashtag (if Dr. Perez doesn’t mind!) to interact with future Chicano Studies enthusiasts and bring up related articles, images, etc.
Blogging on the Cited at the Crossroads site was nothing new since I have my own blog (Stef-a-Sketch). As soon as I knew that we would be given the chance to do blogs for the semester, I knew this is what I would want to do. I am a fan of researching, especially when I get to research topics that interest me, so this was the perfect combination of self teaching with the purpose of teaching others. I know when the time comes I’d like to do something similar on my own, e.g. a blog where I post researched info on multiple subjects, including Chicano Studies!
The only drawbacks I saw were my own, in which I deprived myself of enough time to dive in a little more into each subject I posted about. I also would have liked to tie it in to specific readings since most of the ones we read were very inspirational.
The chance to put our class on the internet really excited me. Although I’ve never been good physically in front of an audience, I love going all out behind the scenes. So again, this was an excellent way to do it. And I believe displaying a high level college class to the world wide web was very appropriate, especially since it is a class about culture, and people. The narrow focus on women I think is something that is also necessary. Like we have seen before, people want to know about this stuff, but sometimes the access of it is lacking. Bringing it down to the personal level of a blog instead of a professional website allows those looking into this subject to enter it more comfortably, and leave with legitimate resources as given by our links. All in all, I’d have to say the use of social media made this class and the experience in general, a very pleasant one that I hope to have in future classes.

New Social media life

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!