Facebook and Moi!

I joined Facebook when it was dedicated solely to college students. This meant you needed a college email account and a part of the college system. During that time, Facebook was all about connecting with your friends in college irrespective of their place in the world. Soon of course, Facebook became a place for everyone – age or school no bar. After this, my reason for Facebook changed. I think from then on, Facebook became a “place” where I could connect with my friends and family across the world. It didn’t matter who or where you were, if you had an account, we could keep in touch. In a way, this has been fantastic in connecting myself with cousins and relatives I wouldn’t normally speak to, estranged family and even finding family I didn’t know existed. It has become a hub where everyone is – kind of like your local hangout. With regards to my friends, it’s pretty much the same story. At first it was about finding your close friends, classmates and so on. Now however, I use Facebook to find out about happenings in friends lives, connect with ones who I’ve been out of touch with and so on. We’ve even used Facebook to create a High School class page where all of us can stay in touch and in addition, we even made a page which would help us organize our reunion.

In terms of my journalism and writing, I use Facebook to connect with people who are in the field to network with. I find that sometimes, it is easier to use Facebook to chat with people who are in editorial positions because email is a tad bit too formal. Via Facebook you are able to loosen the rigidness, connect and see how things go. Either way, you allow yourself to be more approachable and honest with what you want exactly. Using Facebook, I’ve been able to network with people who have passed me on to other people and helped me progress in my career. In the same token however, one does have to be weary for fake accounts and also be prepared to be ignored. I know this only too well. Either way, Facebook is a fabulous way to connect and network with some fabulous people.