This paper is an autoethnography about my experience living in a social media world. I feel like this paper is important to me because of how long I have been around social media. Snapchat and Instagram were released when I was around the ages of 8 or 9. Facebook came out in 2004, when I was at the age of 2. MySpace came out around the same time as Facebook, but closed when I was 5 years old. All of these ages were before I could even accept their terms and conditions.
I am currently a full time student at the University of Minnesota pursuing a degree in Computer Science. I am also a part-time student worker in the field of Information Technology and have been employed there for two years. This work is flexible, and I can work shifts in between my classes and hours until midnight. I got my first mobile phone when I was 11 years old for calling my parents from school when needed, and I got my first smartphone at 13. On my smartphone at the time, I would use Facebook occasionally, but primarily Snapchat in my middle school years. Around 2016 is when I started using Instagram, which was when I entered high school. It is now 2022, and I am a senior in college. I have lived on campus for a year, studied in Oahu, Hawaii for a semester, and now I am in my final semester at home with my parents. With my living situation, I need to commute to school. My form of transportation is the public bus or driving. I also use my email everyday. This is where I see work and school updates in real time.
I am a first generation American, so some of my extended family are in the United States while others are located in Vietnam. My family uses FaceTime to communicate with our family overseas and in other states. This form of communication has changed over time. Previously, we would try to use Skype, but it has been easier to communicate over FaceTime or phone calls.
I started using Facebook on a computer in elementary school, so around the ages of 8 to 10. My main use for Facebook was to play games back when there were games, like Pet Society. I would use my cousin’s accounts so much that they just made my own. I was not fluent in reading, so I had no need to see what people were posting about. I added some other friends around my age a few years later on Facebook. I did not use it very much for posting, but I did use it frequently to message people.
When I started using Snapchat, I would spend hours on it, sending streak messages and random photos to many people at once. This happened when I was around 10 to 11 years old. At the end of middle school was when Snapchat announced Snapchat Memories. I have had my account since then, I am able to view photos from 2016. This is my favorite feature on Snapchat since I can go back and see some of my cousins grow up through these photos and videos. Snapchat Memories definitely holds a lot of memories. I started going away from Snapchat when I lost some of my year-long streaks because this used to be the main reason I would check the application. I have also gone on and off deleting Snapchat to reduce my time on the application.
I then moved on to Instagram at the end of middle school and started high school. I started using Instagram a little here and there to look at peers posts and updates for the first few years. Towards the end of high school is when I shifted my view of Instagram to a creative outlet, like many people did during the 2020s. This is where I am now with my social media use. I still occasionally use Facebook and Snapchat for communication, but I am most active on Instagram. There are Instagram Reels that I find myself constantly scrolling through, but I most enjoy Instagram when I see fashion posts, so I can get inspiration for how I dress and what clothes I can make.
These moments and observations are about myself, my culture, and written by me. My culture is shown when I speak about my friends, family, and my interactions with them. I show how I think when I observe others around me. I have attempted to make my field notes personal and detailed to express my awareness on social media. Focusing on myself can create more raw data when I am not trying to write about my assumption of others’ experiences too. I get to acknowledge my emotions about social computing applications and allow others to read about them to see if they relate too. I am not trying to be relatable, but I’m sure my feelings are not only felt by me.
I like to believe that I have been informally creating autoethnographies when I journal about things I am not sure about. I write down my thoughts and details and try to find patterns within myself to break them or to understand them. This is what autoethnography is about: recognizing patterns about yourself and categorizing them.
I spent a total of 15 days writing daily field notes and reflective journal entries. My journal entries were primarily written about myself to myself. The intent of writing to myself allows me to be more self-revealing, making these entries more open and allowing more unflattering details. These field notes were written at the moment when my thoughts occurred. My reflective journal entries were typically written at the end of the day to wrap up what my thoughts were throughout the entire day.
Throughout the two weeks, I have identified four themes in my field notes: lack of productivity, message delay, urgency, and creativity.
Lack of Productivity
Since Apple released their Screen Time function, I have been monitoring mine to see how much time I spend on social media applications on my phone. Throughout some days, I note how long I have been using Instagram. I think these ranges were lower than they usually are, possibly due to myself monitoring my use. They ranged from 30 to 75 minutes throughout the time of the field notes, but in the past they have been up to 3 to 5 hours in one day.
The main language when I talk about my Instagram use was distraction, feeling bad, or regretting the use of social media for taking so much of my day: “wasted time on my phone,” “distracted on instagram during my free time”, and “regret using my time towards that [Instagram] social media”. During class, I would check my emails or browse social media for a few minutes. Spending even 10 minutes during class time can show a reduction in performance (Felisoni and Godoi).
I find myself grabbing my phone and going through my applications when I have nothing else to do. This is the first thing I do to fill up my time. This behavior is similar to the Jager’s definition of a habit (Jager). Not only did I find myself doing this, but on days that I did not bring my phone, I could see my peers doing this too. I observed people waiting for their class to start and just sitting around the classroom on their phones for a few minutes: “one other person is on their computer and everyone else (5 other students) are on their phones.”
My low feelings were related to specifically Instagram use rather than Snapchat use, even though I have had Snapchat for a longer period of time. Instagram to me holds an endless amount of posts from people that I follow compared to Snapchat. I only have a few friends on Snapchat, and I do not snap people everyday. On Instagram, I send messages and posts almost daily to a few friends. Even on days that I did not bring my phone, I would find excuses to check Instagram. I was messaging a peer through Instagram about a class on my computer, but continued to scroll through the application waiting for a reply. I was scrolling through Instagram for about 20 minutes when I could have started some homework: “I decided to check instagram on my computer. I was using it earlier to contact a peer, and wanted to check back to make sure I didn’t miss any of their messages.”.
Message Delay
For a few days, I decided to leave my phone in my car. I did this in inspiration to Lucero’s experiment of living without a phone (Lucero). I only did this when I drove to school. On these days that I did not carry my phone around, an event was cancelled. Once was a class, and another was meeting with my group mates for a project. I would label these types of messages for myself as urgent since that means I could have left campus sooner. When my class was cancelled, I ended up showing up to class since I did not get the message. A peer who also showed up told me that class was cancelled. The second time an event was cancelled was when my group mates could not show up to the lab. This time, they cancelled a few hours before the meeting time, but I stayed on campus for 1 to 2 hours before I checked my messages on Discord, which was our main form of communication. If I had my phone with me, I could have gotten the notification that it was cancelled sooner and could have left home early. These messages could also be called “mandatory” to our work and school function (Hooper and Zhou).
I think these scenarios are not generally applicable because I believe that most students live on or near campus. Since I have to drive to get home, I would prefer to leave earlier in the day. Nonetheless, sooner notifications for when events are cancelled or changed would be helpful, so I can plan around my schedule again.
During the days that I do not bring my phone, I do feel more productive since I cannot take “breaks” on my phone to scroll through social media as much. During short periods of time in between classes, instead of listening to music or on my phone, I used these times to start my homework or at least get in the mindset of what I can do to meet my deadlines.
Urgency
I notice that I expect fast replies from others, especially when I am trying to schedule meeting times. It has taken hours to reply to a message to schedule a meeting the next day. Sometimes it takes a day to hear back from everyone in my group. This makes me anxious because I am not sure when or if they will get back to me, and I feel unsure how our projects are progressing.
This same urgency is seen from others expecting fast replies from me. Some of these people have expressed concern about our relationship, and if I prioritize them. These conclusions are not fact based, and can lead to false assumptions. A paper conducted in Spain about the “last-seen” message actually concluded that it can create social pressure to respond to messages sooner (Pielot, et al.). All of my messaging applications have this feature, and for those I message frequently always have this feature turned on if it is not already turned on by default.
This urgency is more self revolving because the other party not responding quickly can be interpreted as a sense of non-urgency. A slower response time could be that the other person is prioritizing other tasks in their life, or maybe they just did not get the message or notification.
Creativity
When I use social media, I use it also as a creative outlet. I am able to find fashion and art inspiration as well as post my art and outfits on the application. I find that this outlook on my social media use makes me feel more productive with my time on the application. I get to see what my friends view as art through their lens, and I am also exposed to art accounts and small businesses that make clothing, jewelry, music, etc. This is expressed as a possible benefit of social media; when like-minded people come together and form a community (Amedie). I get to keep up with what my friends are doing in Hawaii when they post aesthetic pictures of being in art galleries, parks, or parties. I get to see my friends in Minneapolis dress up for music or themed events. I found this to be one of the upsides of the internet.
I live in different communities. I am part of the fashion, music, Vietnamese, and feminist community just to name a few. Not always do these sides of me collide together, but I can express all of those parts of me at once on social media. I can repost things that I relate to about being a feminist, like abortion rights. I can post about what fashion is intriguing to me, like dresses from the Met Gala. I can show my support to my Mexican friends when I bring awareness to the femicides in Mexico. I can find community in all of these places at once when I use social media outlets like Instagram.
When discussing with my peers, I do find these themes to be generalizable to them. Feeling like time is being wasted when scrolling through social media or feelings like there is something better to do. A sense of boredom or hopelessness when we spend hours on our phone. Some describe this action as being addicted to our phones, while others may describe them as habitual (Jager). Not only is there a sense of unproductivity, but I think the creativity aspect can be generalizable too. I see my friends post their creativity and what inspires them on social media which in turn inspires me.
We are currently living in a pandemic, but I feel like most of these actions will be persistent when the pandemic is over. I will still be talking to my family overseas and I do not think that the use of social media will change anytime soon. I have lived with social media all of my life, and it has continued showing what people are doing in their lives and what people’s thoughts are when they post. I was hanging out with my friends less during the peak of the pandemic, and I also lost friendships with these people. I think the isolation has really brought out how people truly feel about others and has made me evaluate what values I see in a friend. I have learned with this and created stronger bonds with people I relate with instead. I spend more time and energy online and in person with these people, though that circle is smaller.
If I were to do this same experiment again, I would write more field notes throughout one day and maybe extend the time to a month instead of two weeks. I think the season matters when taking field notes because I notice that I am less social when the weather is colder or snowy than I am when it is warmer with more sunlight. These differences are probably most notable when living in locations with four seasons.
I do not share the same fascination as Lucero’s about “undesigning” technology. I do not think social media is bad or “evil,” but I think it could be made better. I am most concerned about anonymity on social media because it cannot hold people accountable when they bully or say mean things about someone. Bullies in real life can face actions publicly, but this cannot be seen on social media. If the user is banned from the site, no one is notified about it. If a bully is expelled from a school, it is the topic of school lunch and even the teachers. Social media can have more accountability to make the community less toxic. There are no technologies that I wish did not exist. I feel like it is inevitable for humans to find different meanings and different ways of living, and we can do that on social media. We can switch our profile depending on the phases we are in, while still keeping a somewhat socially acceptable profile in real life.
I trust autoethnographies. I learn from my experiences as much as I can learn from others. I think detailed and personal stories are a great way to learn, but these stories are not facts. I learn from these experiences as I would when my friends make mistakes in their lives or when I find repetition in my friends’ actions or feelings. The same goes for autoethnographies. I can find repetition or patterns, and if I feel like it is impacting me negatively, I can learn from their mistakes and try to make mine better.
Amedie, Jacob. Santa Clara University: Scholar Commons, 2015, 2015. Accessed 2022.
Felisoni, Daniel Darghan, and Alexandra Strommer Godoi. “Cell Phone Usage and Academic Performance: An Experiment.” Computers & Education, vol. 117, 2018, pp. 175–187., https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2017.10.006.
Hooper, Val, and You Zhou. “Addictive, Dependent, Compulsive? A Study of Mobile Phone Usage.” Association for Information Systems AIS Electronic Library, 2007.
Jager, Wander. “Breaking ‘Bad Habits ’ : a Dynamical Perspective on Habit Formation and Change.” Academia, 2003, 2003.
Lucero, Andrés. “Living without a Mobile Phone.” Proceedings of the 2018 Designing Interactive Systems Conference, 2018, https://doi.org/10.1145/3196709.3196731.
Pielot, Martin, et al. “Didn’t You See My Message?” Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2014, https://doi.org/10.1145/2556288.2556973.