Social Media Posts
Social media posts are often forgotten pieces of everyday writing given that they don't typically strike people as "writing". However, social media has become such an everyday part of our lives. 80% of the entire US utilizes social media which should go to show that even if we aren't creating these digital pieces of everyday writing, we are engaging with them. From the humble beginnings of blogging prior to Y2K, Facebook monopolizing the social media industry in 2006, Instagram emerging in 2010, and ending up in 2021 with a variety of social media sites where nearly anyone from nearly anywhere can detail their travel experiences through posts and tags. It is mostly based around the demand for attention and when individuals travel to exotic or foreign places, they want to express this experience with others and see how they react.
Not only do social media posts allow for us to create clever captions to express our experiences, but they also allow us to interact with audiences. When people comment on our posts, we have the ability to comment back which creates an everyday writing discourse all stemming from one social media post.
The examples below come directly from my personal Instagram page and were taken during my study abroad opportunity with FSU as well as some personal trips with my family. I have also included a couple posts from museum submitters in the past which have an entire other exhibit devoted to them. Be sure to check it out!
I am a huge fan of The Beatles, so you can imagine my excitement when I found out I was going to study abroad in London. This was one of my favorite opportunities during my entire study abroad experience and I certainly had to document that through Instagram. My professor and classmates happily obliged when asked to imitate John, Paul, George, and Ringo walking across the now-famous Abbey Road in London. The caption I chose was from the track "Her Majesty" from The Beatles' acclaimed album, Abbey Road. I chose this caption because I was sure that everyone knew this famous road and the album cover, but not everyone knows the lyrics from the album. I wanted it to be a slight inside joke to those fellow lovers of The Beatles.
I did not only save my ticket stub that you can view in the "Tickets" tab from the Guinness Storehouse in Dublin, Ireland, but I also made sure to create a post of my experience. We decided to take a group picture in front of the main sign which ended up being a picture used by my friends for their Instagram pages too. This reveals another major part of social media posts as everyday writing in how we all used the same picture for our posts yet we had different takes on what our everyday writing captions would be. These captions create relative meaning for the various individuals who view such posts.
I may have cheated and used Google Translate to help me with this everyday writing caption, but the usage of geographical tags and a foreign language creates a mix of photos that are all connected by a similar location and similar language. The caption reads, "Happy new year from my family to yours. Online translation is a true tool." The caption may not have much to do with the location of the picture itself, but it reveals how I saw the picture being an important representation of our family traveling together. Captions create meanings that can be so relatable to the pictures we see, yet they can create entirely new meanings dependent upon what we decide to choose.
There are a few more travel-related social media posts from our archive below, but don't stop there. Look back at some of the posts you've made regarding travel. Did you tag the locations of them? Feel free to click on those links and see what other people across the world have posted in those locations. Where were they? What did they caption it? There are so many different ways we can create meaning through our everyday social media posts that log such unique experiences.
