Social Media: On Vacation

Last week was reading week and I was lucky enough to spend it in BC visiting some of my friends at other universities. During my week of relaxation and travel I had the opportunity to explore social media usage in a more recreational, interest-based way. I have been so focused on the use of social media for self-marketing and academic uses in this class that I almost forgot about using social media to develop interests and discover new and exciting places and opportunities.The two websites I am going to focus on are Stumbleupon and Pinterest, though there are hundreds of these types of sites popping up daily.

I first heard about Stumbleupon from my friends over Facebook commenting that it is hard to focus on homework when there is so much "stumbling to be done". Obviously I was intrigued enough to sign up for an account. Though at first I found myself looking solely at funny photos and videos, through further investigation I discovered that you could list topics such as agriculture, science, and ecology. Through "stumbling" through interests such as these you can get a quick visual glimpse of current issues and discoveries in those fields. In some ways this is really similar to Twitter, as you can quickly access all types of industry information, but personally, as a visual learner, I find the highly textual nature of Twitter difficult to follow. I also found that sometimes through the random collection of articles and photos I have discovered organizations and causes that really mean a lot to me. For example I am very interested in third world agricultural development and I would love to spend some time overseas improving food security and management and through Stumbleupon I discovered the organization Mercy Corps which works with many facets of third world development including agriculture and food security. They also have many international internships that I may apply for in the future. I had never heard of this program before I "stumbled" upon it a few weeks ago and it may become a very integral part of my life in the future.

Figure 1: Visual representation of a pinboard, Individual images from www.stumbleupon.com, www.pinterest.com, and http://catchwordbranding.com. Compiled by Me. 

Now, once I had discovered these interesting articles and websites on Stumbleupon I needed a place to bookmark these websites. Now an important thing to realize about me is that I am a very visual person so I quickly get lost in a sea of www... links, so I began searching for a visual version of a bookmark list. This is where Pinterest comes in! Pinterest is essential a visual bookmarking website where you "pin" websites onto your online "pinboards", each customized for a particular interest or topic. With each pin you select an image from the website as its representation in your pinboard. As well, you are able to add a comment to the picture, as an added reminder of the website's content. Though most people post recipe and craft ideas onto Pinterest a little searching can find scientific articles. For the most part Pinterest is not very helpful in finding scientific/agricultural information, but for me it is extremely useful in storing and organizing the information I have found on other websites. In class we used delicious for a similar purpose but I found the site difficult to navigate and far too text based. Pinterest is much easier to navigate and the visual representation of information is far more condusive to my learning style.
One of my fellow students commented on the class blog:

Figure 2: Comment from the class blog. Click here to see the original. Image taken from www.ales204-2012.blogspot.com

Alyssa also found delicious difficult to navigate at first, but what really caught my attention in this comment is her comparison between Stumbleupon and delicious. I never thought about delicious being a more organized version of the random collection of information, known as Stumbleupon. In some ways I agree with this statement as I find though the information is organized in stacks , however sometimes the information within the stacks is quite random and assorted. The main difference I can see is that stumbleupon randomly takes viewers to the websites, while delicious takes you to lists of websites that you can sift through. In this way delicious is probably more efficient because you can look at an entire list and decide what you want to look at, instead of having to click past 10 useless sites before finding one of value. These are just a few of my thoughts about these various forms of social media and I hope it will persuade you to try out these websites to uncover or store information based on your own interests and passions.