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Social Media pt 4 !

I'm now at pt4 of my musings on social media, now most people who know me know that I'm a big fan of social media.  It continues to evolve and is changing the way that people communicate and I can see that very clearly with the kids.

We're now in an age where Snapchat & Instagram stories are the norm and now that there's both Instagram and Facebook live, we're in a new era of everyone being a vlogger.  It's also interesting that some kids who can be extremely quiet in normal life are proper keyboard trolls on social media and equally a worry that some are on their phones until all hours of the night.

Whilst I'm not on Snapchat, we have a monitor of what the kids are up to on social media and I keep toot on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook, just in case there's anything shady going on.  The kids are generally good at keeping us up to date on what's going on and they're quite open on sharing, which encourages me.  I'm also incredibly impressed at how mature Lexie is on social media, despite her only being 11, so she doesn't take any messing and has clear beliefs on what's acceptable.

It'll be interesting to see how social media continues to develop.

I still have my frustrations though on how companies and organisations use social media as there's plenty who are still in the dark ages, whilst there's others that are hugely switched on and are pretty brilliant at it.  Then there's the people who use Twitter as a glorified work advert - not a fan of that and whilst I do have a bit of work related stuff on mine, there's also plenty that represents what else is going on and what's important to me.  However, each to their own.

The bit that got me thinking about this again was when one of Lexie's mates (and one of the kids from our U11 group at Houghton Harriers) factimed Lexie to ask what I had planned for the athletics group that night, with a plea for them to be indoors because it was cold outside.  Before Christmas, another of the kids from our group was telling me about how she'd been facetiming her boyfriend - she's 8 ! I think I shocked them by saying that when I was younger and you wanted to talk to your girlfriend you went down to a phone box in the freezing cold with a pile of 10p's - they looked at me as if I was daft !  I'm all for change and moving forward, so who knows what will be in the Social Media pt5 blog !!!

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