Personal Reflection

Although I know that social media can be very helpful in career ventures, I am cognizant of all the possible negative outcomes. I recall one time in high school when the upperclassmen had been exposed for having a group chat degrading the entire Black Lives Matter movement. It was really revolting that they were supposed to be my seniors, and they were saying that one of their African American classmates should not be angered by the fact they use racial slurs because everyone in Hawaii does it. To tell someone that it is the norm in Hawaii to use that slur as an excuse for their usage of the slur, they completely disregard their friend's racial identity and are essentially enforcing discriminative practices. After this was made public, they ended up receiving so much backlash that included threats to their safety. Many people spammed a college Instagram page that had recently accepted one of them to the school. A majority of these people had to completely erase their social media pages and had to take accountability for most of their actions. Supposedly, the college may have revoked one of their scholarships, since it was a very publicized issue, and many of their own students expressed their concerns. It was justifiable, but also some people took it too far, and even the victim of the most discrimination felt sorry for how much attention they got. However, I think that's the repercussions you face when on social media. Even in private group chats, anybody can easily take pictures of anything you say, so it's crucial to educate yourself on proper conduct on these platforms or in general.

However, I believe for me to succeed I need to have social media if I want to build a bigger clientele. There are several things I want to venture into in my fields of interest and social networking platforms will be my largest contributor to that. I would like to possibly start my own business, and if I want to capitalize on it, the best platform would be Instagram as I could post my creations, talk to customers, and build rapport with them. I have seen so many nail shops take off with the aid of Instagram or social media in general. When brands go viral, they garner so much free publicity for their company and see a boom in sales and visits to their page. People are obsessed with trends they see on platforms, and many people want to keep up to date with these. Almost every trend nowadays is popularized through social media, so if I were to utilize the tools of the platform then I could essentially do the same by just following pages with similar ideas as me or kind of seeing what others do to reach success. Even without going viral, many are still able to find other benefits of the network to help expand their small businesses, advertisements on social media have helped increase many sales for companies.

I would make a separate public account for my business endeavors, however, I would keep a separate personal one for just close friends and family. I would still want to reap the benefits of having an online portfolio, but I still want to proceed with utmost caution as anything I do may come back to haunt me. I do think that it is the perfect middle ground for both since I would still be able to have employers look at my professional online presence. It would give me the freedom to get to choose what I want them to see since I will have two separate accounts. I also do not use social media too much and my presence is almost little to none, most people that know me know that I keep a very low profile online. I have many trust issues so I usually never allow people to see anything I do and even if I were to it would be limited to only a few posts as I do not like attention. I also had a toxic unhealthy relationship with social media comparing myself to others because of social media. I have since limited my usage, in turn making me a lot more content with myself. I trust myself enough to think twice about things I post as anything can have repurcussions to it, and I also taught myself to uphold my morals online and never let it be overshadowed by trends or people. All in all, I plan to utilize social media to leverage my professional presence, but will keep my personal use of it to a minimum.