Social Media

The Innovation: Social Media

                              Social Media is something everyone uses now.  People use it for marketing purposes and just to keep up with the times.  Social Media is the collective of online communications channels dedicated to community-based input, interaction, content-sharing and collaboration.

                             Social Media developed on it's own.  People created sites that make it able to communicate without pen and paper.  People got the idea that you should be able to communicate virtually.  One of the earliest sites of social media was called Six degrees.  Six degrees is a site where you can upload on your profile and communicate virtually with other users.   It was invented by Andrew Weinreich and it was created based on the theory that every person in the world could be connected to each other by just six degrees of separation.   The concept of social media started to advance rapidly and Facebook and Twitter were created.  Facebook and Twitter were produced in the early 2000's by Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey.  After the social media that was created became a big hit, a lot of social media came after that like Pinterest, Myspace, Instagram, and Snapchat which are still very popular today.  

Social media is important to the global community because it connects to environmental, social, economic, and political geography.  People are able to look at what’s going on in the world with the tap on the screen.  They are provided with information about any person with an app like Facebook or Instagram. Every social media lets you know what is going on in the world. News has multiple apps to download to see what's going on every minute of the day down to the second.  Most people have social apps like Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram where they can also post what they think which gives people more of their right to their freedom of speech.  People say that social media can encourage more open policy debates as people are given more of a voice to express their opinion now that they are able to give it.  Social media also has a big part in political parties and debates.  Politics have social media accounts which they use to advertise and persuade people to let their voice be heard.  People also have discussions about the election giving you a good indication on who you think will win it.

The 70’s networking technologies had improved and 1979’s Usenet allowed people to communicate virtually.  In the 1980’s home computers were becoming more common, relay chats and IRC’s started to be very popular and continued to be throughout the 1990’s.  That is around the time where social media started to become more sophisticated.  Six degrees was the first well known social media, made in 1997.  It allows users to make a profile and upload pictures and make friends with other users.    This started blogging sites which sparked a social media sensation.  Sites like Myspace was created in the early 2000’s as well as Youtube which created a new way of communicating from far distance. By 2006, Facebook and Twitter both became available to users throughout the world. People use social media during their everyday life.  A lot of businesses use social media to market products, promote brands, connect to current customers and foster new business. People rely on social media because these networks engage people. They bring a very large world together in a simple and easy way.

Social media has already started to transform the world.   It keeps rapidly changing and changes our world in a positive and negative impact.  Social media has affected the way we talk.  We talk with no filter and just spit out anything that comes to mind.  It has made people more judgmental online and real life.  Social media has made us lose some of our social skills, some people now are not capable of holding a conversation and people cannot interact with people in person because of how we are so dependent on it.  Social media gives more convenience to talk to more people and less social quality.  The way we write is now different, it is more summarized because of how limited characters you have on social media.  You get shorter paragraphs and sentences with not much grammar technique.  Social media can also be a distraction and effect time management, organization, and scheduling.  Also information is so available that it is easy for people to find information about you and to be surrounded and sink into the know that is shown on our phones and computers.   Social media also has a positive impact as well as a negative.  It can help advertise and promote awareness of specific causes.  People also use social media to express themselves and to have relationships with people around the world without actually seeing them.   Social media also allows people to stand up for what they believe in by acting upon it through social media.

As a business it is good to have a large social media presence for an extra bit is exposure and benefit.  Social media is getting really big on marketing some companies have been shot up to fame from only exploiting on the social media marketing.  For people who don’t own a business, social media is used to keep in touch with friends, making it the top reason social media is used globally.  Between the ages of 16 and 24 years old social media is to share what you’re doing and most of the time it is used to waste time.  The ages of 33 to 44 use social media to keep in touch with old friends that they rarely see and to look at the news and events going on throughout the world. I think they developed this invention because they wanted a way to communicate virtually.  They developed this invention that started in one area which spread and let others that live in far away places be able to communicate easier and faster through the internet. Before social media we were limited on interaction.  You would have to wait for a letter in the mail, have other people take your calls, and had to wait a week for pictures to get developed.  With the new technology that we have, we can now text, direct message, snapchat, ect. as many people as we want from any place in the world. When there was nos social media you could never get you message across unless you were directly talking to a person.  Your speech was hard to get through to other people because you couldn’t spread the word to everyone.  Now with social media your opinion can be uncensored and shared with a bigger audience.  With social media you are able to connect with other people by how many followers you have on Twitter or how many people friend you on Facebook.


Bibliography :

Hendricks, Drew. “Complete History of Social Media: Then And Now.” Small Business Trends, Drew Hendricks, 6 May 2013, smallbiztrends.com/2013/05/the-complete-history-of-social-media-infographic.html.

“Common Ways Social Media Is Used.” TechAdvisory.org, Editor, 24 Sept. 2014, www.techadvisory.org/2014/09/common-ways-social-media-is-used/.

“Why You Need to Understand the Importance of Social Media.” GROWTH GURUS, Alex and Josh, 4 Sept. 2017, www.growthgurus.com/blog/business-brand-need-understand-importance-social-media/.

“The History of Social Media: Social Networking Evolution!” History Cooperative, Benjamin Hale, 26 Feb. 2017, historycooperative.org/the-history-of-social-media/.