Time to Stretch!

On Thursday, April 23, 2015, I invited all of my 210 FB friends to like our FB page: The Great American Road Trip. It was created by Kelsey, my roommate and a self-taught social media pro. She spent several hours with Whitney, her best friend and social media pro, doing the preliminary planning last weekend and created our cute page. I knew that we would have this cross-country trip; and I am prepared to do some interviews along the way. I hadn't thought that it could be presented as an independent entity on FB.

Looking at our page, I felt that I needed to stretch a little in order to be in sync with the social media trend again. As a Chinese student studying Translation and Interpretation, I only have time for interpretation practice and the Power Core class at the gym. As FB is banned in China, I don't have many college or high school friends on the site. Most importantly, I have grown out of my craze for social media.

When I went to college in Shanghai every one used Xiaonei, meaning "on campus."  It is the Chinese version of FB. I was a diligent writer and photo-poster, and spent at least one hour every day checking who visited or "stepped onto" my page (yes, that's a loved and loathed feature) and what messages were left under my posts. Student clubs used it as an announcement board. College counselors and some professors also joined our cohort so they could learn what was going on among their students and share useful information with us.

In the year I graduated, Xiaonei was renamed as Renren (literally meaning "everyone"), so saying that you use "Xiaonei" can actually date you in China.  As my college classmates began working or went to grad school in the States, fewer and fewer posted on Xiaonei. We were no longer "on campus," and it has become the younger students' "everyone".

Weibo (the Chinese Twitter) took dominance after we abandoned Xiaonei. Then another four years later, it seemed like everyone began using WeChat. It is a smartphone app for voice/video chats and instant messages. You also have the option to see each other's "Friends Circle," the place for posts, but your comments can only be viewed by the poster and your mutual friends. (More and more functions were added to WeChat as it upgraded. You can join mini games, pay for your cell phone plan, do business through the mobile store and even hand out "red envelopes" containing various amount of money for Spring Festival.)

So you see, I am now more comfortable with the interface of WeChat, which gave me a sense of security and intimacy with my friends. Since I arrived to the States last August, I kept hearing "social media," but had not much experience in the field as I only took it as a cool new name for old things.

But Kelsey told me that I could be one of the administrators of our page and keep a bilingual blog for our trip. At that moment, I realized the many functions of social media which I hadn't thought of before. The Great American Road Trip on social media, here I come!

Ijen Vocano, Indonesia