Meanwhile back on Facebook.

Up to this point we've covered the basics of the internet and social media. How we got from essentially randomly posting in the dark corners of the internet to moving out of the dark ages and posting our thoughts and feelings in real time to a much wider audience.

So now that you have such unlimited power at your fingertips, what do you do with it? You’ve clearly read my blog up until this point, so you are undoubtedly curious about where to go from here. You have this endless void in front of you, and the possibilities are endless.

There are many ways that social media (Facebook, Instagram, twitter) can be powerful assets. A few personal examples are meeting up with your friends because one decided to plan a party and used Facebook to invite you. The other is to see how your friend from high school has been doing.
Another is finding love, as I have done several times in the past. You can also buy and sell just about whatever you want (within reason mind you!) You can also find several employment opportunities, in short: you can do just about anything.

Yet social media isn’t the land of riches and sex partners, it has a darker side. The dark side of “the book” is a pathway to many would see as unnatural and unhealthy. Your personal social media reflects yourself. Any entry level marketing student will tell you that you should be very self-conscious about what you decide to put on the internet.

Remember that time you got really hammered and got arrested? You may think that went away, but somehow, someway, someone managed to tag you in that post and it’s stuck on the internet for the end of time. Well probably not, because sooner or later the data would be purged, but the point remains, your social media is a living record of the things you’ve done and said.

I ran a crossed a great blog for students about the do’s and don’ts of personal social media. Joanna Hughes wrote a really good article for students who aren’t really socially aware of the ramifications of social media abuse. Do's and Don't of Social Media for StudentsI’ll summarise if you’re not interested in clickbait.

1.) Try really hard to keep personal information off the internet. When I say personal, I mean where you live. That’s important if you want to keep some kind of social ambiguity from other people.

2.) Don’t post any illegal activities on the internet. I remember a pre - 9/11 world in which you could type a few choice words and believe without a degree of truth Uncle Sam wasn’t waiting to bust down my door (why he hasn’t to this day eludes me.) The point being, if you’re doing something that’s against the law (terrorism is extreme in this case but still), it’s best to keep it off social media

“Hey Bob, Jimmy’s boy is trying meth!”

3.) Don’t believe everything you read. Remember our fearless leader rambling on about “Fake News” yeah, he kind of has a point there. People will put out fake facts to skew an argument in their favour. They bank on you being ignorant and lazy.

Truth be told, I could throw a bunch of random facts your way compiled from various sources. Yet I think you got the general idea of what you should and shouldn’t do on social media. Point being, just think before you hit enter…