The Birth of Social Media

900 Words2 Pages

Social media: (noun pl but singular or pl in constr) forms of electronic communication (as Web sites for social networking and microblogging) through which users create online communities to share information, ideas, personal messages, and other content.

Social media has developed to allow for information to be shared instantaneously: image and video sharing, spontaneous group get-togethers, and worldwide, real time news announcements are sent through time and space with the click of a button, and can spread like wildfire.

In the following pages we will discuss several aspects of social media and how it affects our culture. Issues such as how social media is changing the way people communicate, positive and negative effects of social media, celebrities in social media as well as the psychology and the future of social media.

Just as countries around the world can be broken down into niche communities so too can the social web. Social Web sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter allow us to communicate to our own personal network, just as the newspaper caters to the larger community.

Social communication has come a long way from the village square. From the time Gutenberg invented the printing press in 1440 (about.com) people have been using technology to communicate news, stories and events. Up until the emergence of social networks, we counted on the “town crier”, whether in the form of the man in the village square with the proclamation from the queen, Anderson Cooper telling us the news, or Eli Manning promoting shaving cream, we’ve come accustomed to having our media spoon fed to us at a specified time each day. Social media and social networks have allowed us to receive information from many different sources from all over the world, and interpret it as we see fit.

To fully understand how social networking came to be a world of its own, we need to travel back a few years to when the Internet became commercialized. The first computers marketed for personal use were released in 1984 when Steve Jobs revealed the Apple Macintosh. Jobs proudly pulled this light-weight machine from a bag, and the world would never be the same. Soon after, Bill Gates started Microsoft and introduced Windows, which become Apple’s largest competitor. Once computers were established in homes, connecting and sending information from computer to computer ...

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...rk, pushing out news, information, photos, games, and opinions to each person within their network that can be shared by any person within their own network. It is a mind-blowing web of connections that enables the passing of information and ideas to spread like wildfire. (Murthy) This kind of rapid-fire communication has allowed each individual to be their own town crier amongst their circle of connections. We can now choose what we want to know about, how we consume information, and whom we get it from. Social Networks have been, and will continue to be an integral part of society, and with help of the evolution of technology it makes the world smaller every day.

Works Cited:

Miller, V. (2014). New Media Networking and Phatic Culture. Media Culture & Society, 4, 387 – 400.

Murthy, Dhiraj. (2014). Twitter: Microphone for the Masses. International Journal of Intercultural Relations, 5 , 379 – 789.

Owyang, J. “Email: The First –and Largest– Social Network”. http://www.web-strategist.com. Web. 25 August. 2014

“Spam Statistics 2014”. http://www.toptenreviews.com. Web. 25 August. 2014

http://facebook.com. Web. 25 August. 2014

http://about.com. Web. 25 August. 2014

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