Social Media: the good, the bad

Last Wednesday in class, we presented on social media etiquette. A lot of the presentations surprised me with how petty some of the firings were! It just shows you have to be really careful about how you present yourself on social media, especially if you're a teacher. Teachers getting fired for simply posting photos with alcohol, or mild profanity, is crazy. However, that simply is the way life works, and when you're a public figure, you really have to consider what parts of your life you expose to the public.

My subject was Tony Harris, a comic book artist who went on a very long rant about his disapproval of women who cosplay. His rant was laced with profanity, sexism and ultimately unleashed a stream of bad press. In his rant, he said that very few women actually like comics, and only dress up in skimpy cosplay to titillate nerdy men and inflate their egos. The result of this has been an overwhelming consensus of, "I'm never buying his stuff" or "I'm never working with him again". This occurred almost two years ago, and he's yet to get any significant work--although he is selling original covers on his website for numbers in the thousands.

The rant itself.

In chapter five of the Connected Educator, there are a lot of tools shown that can connect educators with their students. It stresses the importance of bookmarking everything to keep organized, especially in terms of social bookmarking. Social bookmarking websites like Digg and Delicious are good for keeping organized. For less refined social bookmarking, reddit is always fun, especially with subreddits (which basically are microforums) like r/AskHistorians and r/ExplainLikeImFive when you want to learn about new things.

To ultimately keep everything you're following in one place, you may want to consider an RSS Reader. It keeps all of your content together, so you don't have to jump around the web to get your news, but still have it personalized. RSS Readers were always something I had heard were useful, but never fully investigated. As someone who used to be really into fashion, and keep up on comic book journalism as well, it was really difficult for me to keep track of everything. I tried things like Bloglovin, which helped for fashion blogs, and feedly, which helped for everything else--and kept it organized--but ultimately I may finally look into using an RSS feed to keep my content all together.