Growing Up in the Social Generation

Posted on by Max Gerstman

The first social media I joined was MySpace in 2006, which I wouldn’t remember if my MySpace profile didn’t STILL EXIST, even though I haven’t used the networking site in the better part of a decade. I was drawn to social media as a platform to communicate with my friends from different schools and share my thoughts on the world and what was happening in my life.

When social media was new, a lot of people, including myself, began over-sharing their lives on Facebook and other platforms. Whether I was complaining about my middle school teachers or celebrating the result of a football game, I had something to say about EVERYTHING. This all predated the hashtag which separated people into communities, so I was effectively spitting out content into the void. In addition, I loved sharing content, especially things I thought might be socially relevant and make me appear well informed.


Around my sophomore year in high school, I realized the emergence of more specialized social media such as Instagram and Tumblr, designed for the more artistic aspects of social sharing. Instagram made me an amateur photographer, constantly editing pictures to see how ‘artsy’ I could be.

That fad eventually died out, for me at least, and I now use social media sparingly. As I’ve grown older, my social life happens in person far more than over the phone, but I do maintain profiles to help myself appeal to employers and keep a record of what’s going on in my life. I’m interested in the innovations currently happening in social media, to see if the sites can convince me to be more active.

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