Tracy Samantha Schmidt

Archive for November, 2012

How Do You Decide Who to Follow on Twitter?

Posted on November 29, 2012

It’s a basic question and everyone seems to have a different answer. Frankly, I’m still figuring it out myself and I have been using Twitter since 2008. Technically, you don’t have to follow another user on Twitter to see what he is tweeting. You simply have to know what his username—or handle—is and pull it up online. To see my tweets, you would go to http://www.twitter.com/tracysamantha. (The exception, of course, is if a Twitter user has marked his account private and has to give you permission to view his tweets. But hardly anyone uses a private Twitter account, so we’ll skip this topic for now.) The reason you would follow a Twitter user is to “keep up” with what he’s tweeting. That is, of…

My High School Reunion in the Age of Facebook

Posted on November 23, 2012

My 10-year high school reunion was last month. I didn’t want to go because Facebook has made reunions irrelevant. If I wanted to see what a classmate was up to, I just had to look her up on Facebook. My mom insisted I go. “It will be good for your confidence,” said Mom, ever the therapist. “You still see yourself as an awkward teenager.” In high school, I wasn’t a nerd. I just really liked journalism– enough to be an editor of every publication at our high school and a columnist at our town paper. Maybe I did like to hang out in the lobby of Tribune Tower and pretend that I worked at the Chicago Tribune. And maybe I did read every issue…