Keeping Up With Kayleigh

During the past two class meetings we have been watching "The Social Dilemma" which is a short documentary distributed by Netflix. This documentary was released in September 2020 and was directed by Jeff Orlowski. I have seen clips of "The Social Dilemma" on TikTok before, but I never sat down and watched the full documentary before this class. I normally am not the type of person who likes to sit down and watch a documentary in class because I always get tired and distracted. However, this documentary somehow enthralled me and I was intrigued the whole time while watching it. Throughout "The Social Dilemma" we hear from many experts who previously worked in the social media field and now want to inform users of the dangers that social media brings. The main theme of this documentary seems to be how severely addicting all social media platforms are and how these networks manipulate their users to purposefully become addicted to their phones for the company...

As we are nearing the end of the semester we are approaching the final chapters in our textbook for this social media class! One of the newest platforms in the social media world is TikTok. This platform is among the most popular for teens and the younger generation. Many spend countless hours daily scrolling through the latest trends and new content posted by popular creators.  For those who may not know what TikTok is, it is a video-sharing content platform. It has grown over the last few years and now has many different features. TikTok is a Chinese-owned platform that was released in August of 2018. After 3 months of being released, it became the third most downloaded app in the world. As of last year TikTok reached over one billion monthly active users worldwide. It hosts the majority of the 18-24 age group and has more female users rather than male.  TikTok users average about 95 minutes of daily usage and is the #6 most popular social media platform. An average user spe...

Social media algorithms have always confused me. I don't understand how one post will pop up on my feed yet my friend is following that same account but doesn't see that particular post. Chapter 5 tries to discuss a little bit about how the Instagram algorithm works. However, sometimes I really do feel that it is just random! On Instagram, the algorithm is different throughout each feature. That means that the regular feed, stories, explore and reels all have different algorithms that are tailored specifically to them. In the newest Instagram update, your feed is a mix of recent posts from accounts you follow and recommended posts from other users that you are not following. Instagram creates this feed algorithm by monitoring your activity and what type of posts you typically interact with. All of these factors go into what shows up on your feed while you are scrolling through. Instagram's feature of stories has a different algorithm compared to the regular feed. This algor...