I work a wellness coordinator in the wellbeing services county of North Savo . In my work, I already use a lot of different IT programs, I have extensive Microsoft office tools at my disposal: Word, Excel, Clipchamp, Power Bi, I all so use Teams a lot every day, I have several meetings every day via TEAMS. I hardly make business calls on a traditional phone anymore.
In addition, I use the following programs online: Canva to create visual content, Liana mailer to create newsletters, Dream Broker to record and subtitle videos. I am the main user of our wellness area’s customer feedback system and manage users in it, develop the system and remove inappropriate feedback.
Our unit regularly tries out new applications to make work easier, mainly those found online. We hold a digital tip hour in our unit once a month.

The level of information security in our wellbeing services county area is so high that most users cannot access social media channels, I have also separately applied for permission to use the following closed services: Facebook, Instagram and Youtube. In addition, permission must be applied for to use new applications, the IT administration decides whether there is a wider need for the desired program and in the current economic situation, the aim is to reduce the number of applications due to costs.
In our welfare area, it is forbidden to use the following services: X, TikTok and Snapchat.

Youtube
Youtube would easily reach a wider audience than the unknown Dream Broker application we currently use. Uploading a video to Youtube is also much faster. Youtube has a very good feature of subtitles, it works relatively well and with a little work you can change the language to many other languages. I plan to use this in the future! With the current system, subtitling a video easily takes days of work and translating from Finnish to English does not work at all.

Doodle
Doodle application. I will use this application. The app makes it easy to propose a meeting or other gathering for a larger number of people and see what would suit the majority of them best. Then organize an event and invite them along. It’s a wonder why this isn’t available in TEAMS or hasn’t been found. No more dozens of emails and scheduling conflicts.

Linkedin
Linkedin, I’m aware of the app and many of my friends are already there. It would also be good to join there in terms of networking. If I were looking for a new job, I would definitely join the app. Through networking, I could meet new people with whom I would have things in common related to my work.

TikTok / Snapchat
TikTok/Snapchat application. My job is to promote well-being and health. Today’s young people no longer follow Facebook like older people. TikTok and Snapchat offer short videos as content that young people are interested in. By creating content for these platforms, we would reach young people, possibly get our message across to them better, and be able to influence matters related to their well-being and health.

Social media from a good and bad perspective
Social media reaches people easily and it is easy to join in. Many things can be learned there and the amount of information is unlimited. You can easily find new areas of interest, you can meet new people in the virtual world, and you can also easily produce content there yourself. Social media has expanded enormously over the past decade. Another good aspect of social media is that it makes it easier to interact with people, you no longer have to call or send a letter to the other side of the world and hope that it will reach you. Instead, you can make a video connection directly from your home or wherever you are going. I mainly use social media to keep in touch with my friends, some of whom live far from Finland. In addition, I have been making travel videos on YouTube since 2012. In recent years, I have also made live broadcasts on social media. I also follow topics related to my hobbies on social media. However, social media has taken a lot of discussion topics away from internet discussion forums.

Social media from a bad perspective
Social media also brings bad things with it. Many social media platforms feed young people with material that has a detrimental effect on their growth and development. Many young people use social media platforms to find information about fashion, trends, and dieting, and through this, they get false information and influence on things that cannot necessarily be verified as true, and can even be outright scams. Social media platforms also attract criminals, from small frauds to the loss of huge sums of money to organized crime.
AI to these social media platforms brings us different videos to watch. Artificial intelligence learns what the viewer likes, starts offering more and more of them, hooking the viewer to watch more and more videos. For example, the TikTok app works completely differently in Western countries than in China. In China, its content is based on teaching and educating the people. In addition, in China, the app does not work in the evening and at night.
The conversations that take place on social media forums are often not the same as conversations that take place in normal life. People’s conversations are often at a lower level and, if necessary, they can hide behind a name tag.

Digital media and me

In my work, I use social media a lot, and in my free time I all so make youtube videos to social media channel. In recent years, I have also added AI generated speech and images to videos. When using social media, it is important to be critical of the source, not everything is what it appears on the screen. For example, a lot of propaganda material is produced for social media about various conflicts. In my work, I have also been involved in working on new ways of operating in cybercrime. I have also organized events where residents are informed about these issues. Over the past year, my understanding and knowledge of the harmfulness and crime of social media platforms has grown a lot. The development of AI, for good and bad, is something that will affect each of us in the future. It is very important that adults teach children how to use social media and they have a duty to monitor how children use it.