I’ve been thinking back and trying to remember when I started using Facebook, which was probably my first experience with social media. My oldest photo on Facebook is from October 2008, so it had to be shortly before that. It was a new thing, and it spread throughout the office fairly quickly. Everyone joined at about the same time. It was probably a month before I actually posted anything.

I started off with it fairly slowly, checking it on weekends. My friends list was small; mostly people at work. Then Mafia Wars came along and changed everything! It seemed like everyone I knew and everyone I met was playing the Zynga game through Facebook, and to advance in the game, you had to add new players, culled from your Facebook friends list. So naturally, my friends list grew exponentially. Sadly, however, Facebook morphed from a way to connect with a few handfuls of friends, family and co-workers to a microcosm of the world in general, connecting me with people I didn’t know very well.

It’s amazing how from that rough start, in a few short years, social media has become ingrained in my life — both personally and professionally. Watching the presentations in Tuesday’s class of all the different platforms and networks (one or two i hadn’t heard of) really drove the point home that social media has just consumed everything we do, whether that’s listening to music, reading books and papers, dating, watching TV and just interacting with other people.

The first thing I do every day, and the last, is check Facebook and other platforms (but mostly Facebook). And through its mobile app, I’m checking it continuously all day long.

And at work, the website I manage, in the past year has doubled the number of users acquired through social media referrals, a direct result, I think, of implementing a (still developing) social media strategy in the newsroom. It’s a trend I want to continue, as I believe, in time, a majority of the engagement with our website will come from various social media platforms.

That trend also comes a changing demographic and changing world, one where digital media and social media are inexorably linked.