I clicked on 60 of the best Public Relations blogs in the world and the first blog that caught my eye was SpinSucks. I was expecting something more professional and boring, like the many I saw before and after, but I knew that SpinSucks would be interesting.
Opening SpinSucks you see a lot of posts with very interesting topics. Topics ranging from the basics like “Build Your PR Content Strategy with This Targeted Toolbox” to “Gin and Topics: You Got a Friend In Me”. As I was scrolling I found a post called, “How Being Generous on Social Media Will Change Your Life” by Paula Kiger. I was interested in this because social media is known for somewhat ruining peoples lives no matter how they act. My first thought was how it is going to be dropping simple compliments on peoples Instagram pictures and making sure to like everyone’s Facebook posts, even the people that you did not like. I realized that I was way off.
I began to read this article and I could not agree more with Paula. She talks of her twenty year old daughter and how her life is much simpler and less complex than hers was at twenty. She talks about Pandora and Rate My Professor.com and how we make our lives much simpler by using them. Everything she said was very true. My generation is so used to being coddled to and we are known as the generation to get participation trophies. We want to have the easy way out, even if that means that we have to have six classes back to back, three days a week, all because we needed easy teachers with minimum school work. We do not have to worry about getting any country music in our Gang$$ter Rap Spotify playlist we spent weeks on trying to perfect as well.
Our lives are incredibly simple now a days. We can follow, creep on, and talk to anyone we want in the whole world. That may sound scary, but we have the ability to do so much more and talk to so many more people than our parents ever could. Though social media can bring on issues that should never be there, or even seen as important, it can bring very important discussions. We have the chance to affect and connect with so many people and what we are mostly concerned about is how many likes we get on a Instagram post and how many retweets we could get in 24 hours.
Social media is a platform meant to connect with people everywhere. It is meant for us to meet people that we may not have the same interests in or have the same type of background. We should not be using social media to bring our popularity points up, but to engage with people who can teach us valuable life lessons and show us the importance and beauty in life. We should never shield ourselves from different people just because they do not have the same amount of followers. We were meant to be generous.
paysam 
I love your thoughtful take on the role of generosity in social media. Social media does give us the opportunity to connect with people so far away, but if we do it right, it does something timeless: leads two (or more) people to feel a bit better understood, informed, or supported. 🙂
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Thanks for reading Spin Sucks! Love your perspective on Paula’s article. Social media is such an interesting dynamic when it comes to communications. It has to ability to cheapen communication and relationships, but it also has the power to create strong bonds between communities and people who might have never connected otherwise. We make the choice of which one in how we use it.
Hope to see your face on Spin Sucks more often!
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Payton-
I really like this post, and I think you make a lot of good points about how we don’t use social media to it’s full potential like we should be doing. I know that I could definitely take some pointers from this post and try to connect with others and use social media to my full advantage. Good post!
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