1.1 Reviewing your own social media
To help you manage the good and bad aspects of social media in higher education in the next activity you will begin by reflecting both on the key features of social media and how you currently use them.
Activity 1 Reflecting on your social media use
The purpose of this activity is to assess your current use of social media. This will enable you to reflect on how it might work for you to engage in social media for Higher Education.
To get the benefits from social media without being affected by its disadvantages, it’s important to be aware of your own use, how you are engaging with it, how does it make you feel and what your purpose is for opening these apps. This reflective audit is designed to help you do this. Make notes here, or on paper. Be as honest as possible with yourself in answering, we rarely take the time to reflect upon these issues and when we do, it can help us to identify how our own priorities, goals and values may be being compromised.
Click on all of the social media apps that you currently use on a weekly or daily basis then answer the following questions. There are no right or wrong answers.
How often do you spend more time on a particular social media app than you are comfortable with?
Are any of these apps particularly problematic to disengage from?
Is there anything on social media that helps your studying? If so, what?
Is there anything on social media that holds you back from your studying? Make a note of why/how.
Is there anything on social media that affects your motivation towards studying? Is this positively or negatively?
Do you ever miss out on time on formal learning material provided by your Higher Education institution because you are spending so long on social media?
Have you ever had problems meeting an assessment deadline after spending too long on social media, even if it was related to your studies?
Discussion
There are no right or wrong answers in this activity. Here, it is part of our intention to help you consider and assess your time, behaviour and goals in using social media. These questions are all based on research about both optimal and problematic social media use. Continued, compulsive use of social media, mindlessly scrolling through TikTok, getting involved in heated debates on Twitter, can be a good way to pass the time. But if you are continuing to do it even when you know it means you will have less time to do an assignment, then this is a problem for you.
Research suggests problematic social media use can be identified in a number of ways. This includes recognising when you are using it compulsively and repeatedly, even when your judgement tells us this is problematic, or when it prevents us from engaging in other more pressing tasks. Problematic use can also be identified when using the app is harming you, your health, relationships or aspects of your work or study.
It is important to be self-aware about the potential for problematic social media use to impact you. This is particularly crucial to monitor since research shows that many of the apps are now specifically designed to be hard to disengage from. You may have thought about these issues before, or this may be the first time you have reflected on your social media use. Being critically aware of the problematic aspects of social media use makes it easier to take simple actions to change how you use it.
You will continue to reflect and learn new strategies to maximise opportunities presented by social media and limit the negative impact it can have across the course. This skill is important because our engagement with social media changes over time, and with the development of new apps or additional functionality in existing apps, our behaviour can also change. Author Ana Homayoun (2018) states that the ever-changing nature of social media means that to maintain social media wellness we need to focus on the 3 Ss framework of socialisation, self-regulation and safety. This will be the focus of our next session.