Social Media: What I Learned in College, and What it Means for the Future

This past semester, I enrolled in two very different social media classes that I did not suspect would have such drastic differences. One of which is an art class, Design for Social Media, taught by Brit Rowe and held in the art building. The other is Principles of Social Media, taught by Alisa Agozzino and held in the theatre building. With only one word difference in the classes, I thought that it would be a breeze, using concepts I learned in one class to help support what I learned in the other one, but this would not be the case.

Design for Social Media teaches us about how social media grabs the attention of the user, while also matching the energy that the company wants to portray. We learn how companies design their campaigns and posts to best portray their personality, and how that is done in different circumstances. For instance, one of our projects was redesigning Nike's campaign for their "Remember The King" shoe that was supposed to commemorate Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. We analyzed what the brand portrayed, how it was received, and then we each created, perfected, printed and displayed our new campaign for all the art students to see. It was very hands-on, and I learned a lot about how to be a social media manager or artist for a company.

Principles of Social Media taught us about each platform of social media and how to understand the metrics of how much profit a social media post provides a company. We also had weekly tests to ensure that we knew APA grammar, and social media simulations to experience what mass posting would look like with different forms of social media management. It focused on the business side of social media, more than what I think of when I think of "social media." It was majority run by AI and prewritten lesson plans, but I still learned a lot about the business of social media. 

All in all, I learned that social media is an art form that is quickly being swallowed by efficiency and numbers, just as many other art forms are. The survival-of-the-fittest law that everything follows in capitalism destines all art forms to become a shallow husk of itself to cater to lucrative-ness, and if you or I choose to pursue social media in the future, we must build the muscle to stay true to the purpose of art, and not fall victim to systematic bribery.

The End of College

 In my time at Ohio Northern University, I have experienced much more than I could have ever asked for or accomplished on my own. As I near the last couple of weeks, I struggle to cherish them. I know that the walkability of campus, the ease of access to friends, the locality of everything and the beauty of abundant trees near me will all be gone, and I'll realize that I've taken them for granted. But I thrive in abundant change, and I welcome the next chapter of my life with enthusiasm and excitement. 

All the friends who have come and gone; the memories I've made with them are priceless. I wouldn't trade the anxiety, tears, joy, experience, lessons and stories for anything. Well worth the crippling debt that I'll be swimming in in a couple of weeks. 

I've learned that the advertisements for colleges that are photos of students on campus, hanging out with friends, not really focusing on education, are the truest advertisements. To me, college is about the experience with others more than it is a place of education. Perhaps that is not a good trait, but I will carry those experiences more than I carry any kind of academic information. As I enter the next chapter of my life, wherever that will be, however that will go, I have the influence of these past four years to influence my decisions, personality and work ethic. 

Greek Sing 2026

 Monday was the beginning of Greek Week at Ohio Northern University. The kickoff for the week is a series of musical performances performed by each social fraternity and sorority. Everybody gets the same theme; this year was video games, and each fraternity and sorority gets an individual theme within that. My fraternity, SigEp, chose Wii Sports. Although technically, I chose Wii Sports as our theme as the Greek Week delegate and the one in charge of Greek Sing. 

As the only one with theatre experience, I was chosen as the only person to conceptualize, write the story, come up with song ideas, write lyrics, choreograph, cast and rehearse our performance. I had many ideas, including Bad Bunny in the halftime show, a boxing match and people playing real sports on the stage. In the end, the story ended up following a new member, or a Wii rookie, through his journey of joining the frat right before Greek Wii-k. We find that he is bad at every sport, and so he goes through a training montage of becoming good at sports.

Here is where I thought that the story was becoming too simple. Just a simple training montage was the whole story. So, as the story follows, Greek Wii-k starts, and mug tug is first, which we play against the Delts, this fraternity of mainly football guys, and they never lose mud tug. We inevitably lose, and the new member starts spiraling. We help support him, and the next sport that he has to show his skill in is kickball. After introducing the opposing team, the new member kicks the ball out of the park on his first try. He's got his mojo back and comes to the final event to win, boxing. In a fight scene that spans two songs, eventually he wins, and we all cheer.

After the month of intense rehearsal and the impossible feat of maintaining the attention of 30 frat guys for two entire hours a day, we performed. It felt like it was a part of me that we were showing to the audience. Hours of thought, planning and execution all came to a culmination. After all the performances, we won first place by the judges, as well as the people's choice awards from non-Greek voters.

I was on the verge of tears as they were saying the results, just as I am writing this now. I'm so proud of everyone who worked with me on the specifics of lyrics and unchoreographed bits when it got too overwhelming. I don't think we could have done it without the support and effort from all the brothers of Sigma Phi Epsilon.

The Social Dilemma

Watching the documentary, The Social Dilemma, I'm learning a lot about how the employees of social media companies feel about the problem of social media. The damage it does to mental health and society overall. It isolates you, it enables cyberbullying and cybercrime, you can see horrible things and it erodes our social structure. The people in the documentary understand the evil that this industry poses, but are unable to define the source of the problem. It seems to me that the issue is more systemic than the fault of one man or group.

Throughout the documentary, one quote stuck out to me:

"If you're not paying for the product, then you are the product."

It's an attention market; the good being sold is our time. It's sold to advertisers to get data on what we like, want to see, how we want it, and how it best manipulates us. Marketers need a lot of data to develop an accurate business model, and this is best obtained through social media algorithmic tracking. They know what you look at, how long you look at it, when you're depressed, when you're excited, all to predict what you're going to do, and who you are. It's evil, without a human mastermind. But if you read my last blog, a computer brain doing harm is just as evil as an animal brain.

I feel this in my own life, lacking the motivation to get ready for the day due to scrolling, deciding on my outfit based on what looks good on other people on my screen. The phone games that take up hundreds of hours of my life in total, the social media algorithms that are designed to take every last second of my life, the productivity apps that are brightly colored and convenient for similar reasons, etc., all are ways that this issue impacts me and others in my generation, I'm sure. 

Completely giving up technology seems like a step backwards, but maybe we need more balance in how much we relax and how productive we are. The capitalist desire to be the best competitor in the room causes society to spiral into an overworked, strained population. One that I do not want to be a part of. 

The Thinking Toilet

 Recently, I started reading this book by Douglas Hofstadter called I Am A Strange Loop. It is a very complex and interesting book about the realities of consciousness and reality. I'm only on chapter 5, but it has already blown my mind with new and interesting ideas. One of which is the thinking toilet.

Hofstadter introduces this topic by explaining how a toilet works; without going into extreme depth, the handle raises a rubber plug that initiates a siphon that flushes the toilet. When this rubber plug misses the hole, the toilet will automatically refill and flush again in an attempt to get the plug back into its spot. We can explain this phenomenon by saying that the toilet is trying to fix the leak, but it can't. These words are italicized because it sounds as if the toilet has a desire to flush correctly. But can a toilet desire something like we can?

The knee-jerk reaction to such a question would be no, a toilet cannot think and therefore cannot desire something like I desire a coffee, or even like a sunflower desires to face the sun. Hofstadter tackles this problem by defining a feedback loop system. A soccer ball, thrown into a halfpipe, would eventually fall to the very bottom of the structure, because, due to physics, that outcome is the state that the system ultimately desires, similar to the toilet desiring to be successfully flushed. If we watched a time-lapse of a sunflower, we would see a similar behavior: the seemingly random attempts to reach a desired state.

What do you think? Do these systems desire? Are we just complex systems?

The Impacts of YouTube on My Life

 As a kid, my routine was to wake up at 6:30 a.m. to catch the school bus at 7 a.m., go to school, come home around 3 p.m., play games on my laptop with YouTube playing in the background until 11 p.m., then fall asleep to YouTube—and repeat. I spent the entire evening every week staring at screens and overstimulating my brain. 

My parents divorced when I was 2 years old, and neither knew how to be an effective parent without the support of the other, so screen time was a very effective way to give an illusion of contentment. Unfortunately, I see parents using this method to deal with the vicissitudes of having children very often. Most of the top 10 watched videos on YouTube are Cocomelon songs or nursery rhymes for young children. This means that above all, YouTube is mainly being used to pacify distressed children. The unavoidable stress that comes with raising a child is not something that parents can just pack away into a little screen. They are sacrificing precious time with their child, with comfort and ease of existence. 

When growing out of this routine, I found myself unable to sleep without a video playing in the background. When I would try, I would become terrified of the dark and find myself too conscious of my thoughts. I had to live years of my life shackled to this habit that became near-impossible to overcome. I'm happy to say that today, I very much appreciate a silent room when going to sleep, but it was a rough road to get here, and I still have an adverse reaction to doomscrolling or binge-watching.

In conclusion, screentime is a dangerous thing for people of all ages. In a world of expanding stimulation and scraps for attention, keep an eye on your screentime, and especially the screentime of the children in your life. It has had a detrimental impact on my life, and I wouldn't wish that impact on anyone else.

The Comfort of Pinterest

 Pinterest is a platform that has a different angle on social media when compared to other main social media brands. It is not used to talk to friends or to post about your daily life or vacations. It's not used to call or message others, but to express yourself artistically. At least this is my experience with Pinterest. 

In class, we learned about how the platform is used for purchasing. It's like Etsy, where people can learn about different personalized products and find the perfect thing to buy. Personally, I do not like seeing advertisements for products; it really messes up the boards and the whole aesthetic purpose of the platform for me. The posts that have some product in the image are positioned aesthetically for me to look at and visualize, which is a marketing tactic, but it's not pushy. I can save a pin of a stained glass lamp without feeling pressured to even look at the item that's for sale.

The comfort I find in Pinterest is the artistic freedom. You can save pins with a certain aesthetic to them, you can make collages of pins and you can create a home page of artistic images that most align with your artistic preferences. It seems like the last platform that can still be used for expression instead of business opportunities and networking. Whether this comfort is due to the genuine purity of the platform or the skill of deception from the advertisers, I don't know.

But at the end of the day, Pinterest might take the spot for my favorite social media platform on account of its simplicity and art. It is a breath of fresh air in a world of advertisements and branding. If you're not on the platform, I encourage you to try it out.