Instagram, and Tumblr, and Youtube! Oh, My!

Social media is like a Russian Matryoshka doll. At first look, it’s a pretty hand-painted wooden doll, but then you open it. Surprise, another pretty hand-painted wooden doll! And another and another. And the last one is so cute because it’s so tiny! (Oh, the joy of tiny things.) Every link we click is like opening that doll and finding something new.

Russian Matryoshka Doll
Image: link to {http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matryoshka_doll}

As I was trying to think of how I’ve seen or used social media platforms to share poetry, quotes, or other literary items, I first went to the sites I use most often, Facebook and Instagram. You know when you get a new car and all of a sudden you see that car everywhere? Well, that happened. As I scrolled down my Instagram feed, I came across my cousin’s Instagram account called captured.silence. I’ve noticed her writings before, but this study of poetry had me stopping and actually looking at her profile. From there, I saw a link that led to her Tumblr account. I’ve heard of Tumblr, but I’ve never used it. Wow, I found some really neat things on there. You can search a topic and follow all sorts of blogs (I'm now following 44 blogs. Ha ha.). I searched poetry and came across tons of profiles of normal people just wanting to share their private and beautiful thoughts with the world. My favorite blog I found is called BostonPoetrySlam. On this blog, I found a link to Youtube for a video of the 2014 National Poetry Slam champion, Pages Matam, performing “Brown-Eyed Girl”. Oh. My. Goodness. I have fallen in love with slam poetry. Such emotion. Such fierceness. The next thing I knew, I was clicking on video after video of poets reading their poems with such passion! When we love something what do we usually do? We share it! Unfortunately, I had to wait until my friends were available, but I've now had my roommate watch this video and I’ve also told my Mom all about it! Now, I just need to post it on Facebook.

What good is finding or creating something incredible if we don't share it?!

The beauty of social media is that it’s such a boring term for something so fun and creative! We make jokes about how we spend too much time playing on Twitter or watching our Facebook notifications, but it really is a whole world of people wanting to reach out beyond their small lives. We just have to do a little bit of searching with a click of the mouse and then that world is ours.