The 21st century is the time of huge technological progress. It is hard to imagine that something like ten years ago social media was significantly less developed than nowadays, because networks such as Facebook, Twitter, Skype, fast internet connection, texting and many other things people enjoy doing now were only on the stage of creating, testing. It is a good thing that the World is moving forward, everything is changing for better, mostly. The new phenomena comes along with the technological and informational progress, improvement of Social media. Internet has been used more and more by the users with different age. It is interesting, but users of age 50, 60 and even more do use the Internet quite often as well as social media.
Social media is a new mass-influencer, that changes the way people interact and communicate with others. What is it? How and when did it appear? How does it influence us? These questions I will try to analyze and answer in my essay.
Social media comprises of the special set of online tools and web sites, created for the interaction of the people with companies, services, infrastructures, different brands and other people as well as some actors, stars and others, it is implemented by specific ways of creating and sharing of the content. These changes with the speed of light and has many forms. The main base is social networks: Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, different media content communities such as Youtube, Flickr, Instagram, gaming web sites. You might wonder what are those things?
First of all, blog is an online journal created by one person about different topics. It is being updated regularly and new posts are displayed in the chronological order. Usually, there are sections for comments and links for other users to rate and leave their feedback to the writer’s journal entry. A bright example of this can be Twitter, which allows users to post messages on their microblogs up to 140 symbols.
Speaking of Podcasts – they were created for transmitting of the information via audio broadcasting (digital file, as a rule audio file) that is being downloaded onto the computers, iPods and other gadgets. These audio files are in the form of radio, talk show style.
Moving onto the social networking. These are the online communities, that allow you to create your personal page (profile), search and meet new people, add friends, share events, send messages and communicate with other members. This is the most-visited web site in the world so far. It gives you an opportunity to always keep in touch with the people you love and people you care about.
Another way of interaction online for some people, especially youngsters, is by playing games. Social Gaming. Online games include a common set of interactive tools such as chats, voice communication, interactive elements or content that can be shared online. Great example of this is Xbox Live. Social games are present on social networking sites (Facebook), and websites. Players do have an opportunity to create, manage, edit their profiles, to chat, to play, to communicate with gamers online, and to share achievements and other information with people all over the world players.
More and more audience get websites for photo and video sharing. Basically, it is a website that keeps user-uploaded videos or photos and make them accessible on the Web. YouTube is the revolutionary, very popular video-sharing web site, it is the second most visited in the world. Users create their accounts and upload videos directly onto their profile. Interesting fact is that if your video gets a lot of views, becomes popular – you might be lucky to get paid a certain fee, that comes from advertisements.
The most favorite website among schoolers and students is Wikipedia. It is the electronic encyclopedia that has answers for all your questions! It is being developed by a community of users, actually they can edit, update the information by themselves, which makes this website unique.
There are many other bright examples of Social media: For example news channels websites such as CNN, BBC, Discovery, ABC and many others; Web sites of different brands, companies: Apple, Samsung. And they are all interconnected between themselves. It has become a part of the regular dwelling, we get involved in social media every day. The best way to get into it is to start following a community, web site that best suits your interests, fulfills your needs.
“Like all technology, social media is neutral but is best put to work in the service of building a better world.”(Simon Mainwaring). We got really used to social media with time, it has become something regular like reading a newspaper, watching TV, listening to the radio, and in fact, mostly it tends to replace these media tools. Hence, a very important questions arises: How does it influence us? In what way: Positive? Negative? Or Both? Thus, does social networking make our society better or worse ?
Let’s start off with positive effects. With the help of social networking the way we communicate changed dramatically. We can meet new people, stay in touch with old friends. It doesn’t take days, weeks to send a “message”, as it was 15 years ago by means of mail.
Internet services unite, group people into communities. A good example of such activity could be social media support, after Earthquake in Haiti in 2010. Volunteers from Facebook, Twitter and other social sites were able to support, share news updates by means of social media.
The most important and impressive part of such support was charity donations, by means of text messages. People all over the world donated more than $10 million to help the people in need, affected by the earthquake. Social media became the very useful tool of spreading the world quickly.
On the other hand negative influence is present as well, as always. There is no such thing that would be perfect, social media is not an exception. More and more people get too obsessed with these virtual worlds. With spending more and more hours in the internet, (Facebook, Twitter) and other social networks, people decrease their time of face-to-face communication, regular way of intercourse. And this might become a huge problem for some individuals. By chatting online you do have time to overthink your reply, maybe cover the truth, but the situation in the real world is slightly different. Once people meet after they got acquainted online, usually some misunderstandings arise. Suddenly, the person you thought you knew appears to be a different one, maybe the person you adore is the one online, not in real world.
Facebooking with Social media have changed the word “friendship” as well. Nowadays, a child can get up to 200 friends in a day, but in fact, it might turn out that no one you can trust, believe from that friend list. Bonds between social friends and real friends are different. Another issue that users face is privacy. With the fact of sharing the content online constantly leakage of personal information is inevitable. Even such secure giants as Facebook, Twitter, MySpace do not guarantee that you are 100% safe from such thing, in fact, they even use your information after you deactivate your profile.
Overall, there are pros and cons. In my honest opinion I do think that there is a golden middle. It is a simple truth – you just need to try to combine everything wisely. Personally, I do rely on social media. I do use internet resources a lot for different purposes: Studying, meeting new friends, chatting, staying in touch with the people that I am interested in, getting new information online, relaxing, or just simply surfing the web, and I like gaming also.
Finally, The social media is becoming more and more connected with our lives recently, there is nothing strange or bad about it, it brings a lot of opportunities and it is only up to the user, how to use them. But the future will prompt how it actually affected the mankind.
Works cited
Social Media Overview - Digital Communications ." Digital Communications - . N.p., n.d. Web. 2 June 2013. <http://webcomm.tufts.edu/web-resources-tufts/social-media-overview/>.
Reflections on social media power and influence." Home. N.p., n.d. Web. 2 June 2013. <http://www.businessesgrow.com/2013/03/19/reflections-on-social-media-power-and-social-influence/>.
Social Media Strategies | Social Media Platforms | Social Marketing Campaigns | TKGenius | Online Marketing Strategies & Training." TKGenius | Online Marketing Strategies & Training. N.p., n.d. Web. 2 June 2013. <http://www.tkgenius.com/info-archive/types-of-social-media/>.
"Simon Mainwaring." BrainyQuote.com. Xplore Inc, 2013. 2 June 2013. http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/s/simonmainw494024.html
