November 's Theme: Navigating Social Media

01-11-2018

It’s November...

... And in our little neck of the woods daylight saving time has just ended and the days are growing noticeably shorter. Biking through the rain in the dark, I can tell you I often don’t have a desire to go back into the cold in the evening just to go somewhere else and meet people. Instead, I curl up with a nice cup of tea in front of my computer and just talk with friends online. 

But… isn’t that bad for you? Well, this month’s theme is centred around navigating social media.

There is an eternal debate about the effects of social media, with a lot of focus on the bad. There’s the issues of cyberbullying, FOMO, how social media can create unrealistic expectations… but we are not here to only add to the heap of negatives, although we are not ignoring it either. 

Blog topics

Instead, this month we will have a couple of blogs that hopefully help increase your understanding about the complexity of social media, why people gravitate towards it because of the type of needs it can fulfil, and whether social media is doing any good for us.

During this month we want to help you navigate online social spaces safely, highlight the benefits of social media, show the different perspectives of young and old, and dive into how offline and online interactions bridge different social gaps. 

We can’t give you the definite answer on whether or not social media is good or bad for you, and that is not our intention. However, we can give you some tips on how to curate your online social experiences and offer insight into perspectives that might be different from your own.

We hope you join us this month for all these discussions, here and on twitter; @GEMH_Lab!

Author

Babet Halberstadt

PhD candidate with a background in neuroscience, now combining her love of gaming with her interest in the brain and human behaviour. Collector of useless skills, photographer, illustrator, and ukulele player.

Contact

More updates

We'd like to hear from you,
to build a better community