By Kelly Carr

I had a MySpace page once. Yes, that was a popular website for a while. It was before the term social media was even in my vocabulary, yet that’s what it was. I resisted for a while, and when I eventually gave in and made my own profile, soon everyone was moving to Facebook. Once only available to college students, when Facebook opened up to anyone and everyone, the whole world joined the site, it seemed.

Then Twitter became all the rage, which I still don’t connect with as well as some people. But I have found Instagram to my liking—a place to share photos and visually keep in touch with a few friends. People share videos on Vine, live stream events via Periscope, and post résumés on LinkedIn. New social media sites are popping up all the time.

Much of the Internet has a social aspect to it. There seems to be something intrinsic in most of us that desires to find others out there who enjoy what we enjoy, who will listen to what we have to say, who will let us know we are not alone.

As with anything, people use social media in positive and negative ways—to stay connected or to make inappropriate connections; to share exciting news or to tear others down. With each new development of technology, how we interact with others and present ourselves to the world reveals something about our hearts. We’re best served when we participate with the goal of reaching out, lifting one another up, and teaching the next generation to do the same.