In today’s day and age, it is very rare to see someone who doesn’t carry a smartphone, or at the very least have access to one. Due to the fact that there is an enormous influence around these phones, the culture of everything is starting to revolve around the smartphone and its features. By having a device like this, it allows for web browsing, phone calls, and most importantly, world-wide connecting, at the palm of your hands and on the go. Since the smartphone is heavily used because of its convenience, people are starting to direct their attention towards social media and the positive benefits that can be had.
To define social media, it is a term used to describe technology that allows for online social interaction between multiple people for conversations, collaborations, and creativity (Dabbagh & Kitsantas, 2012). When it comes to this type of online concept, it includes applications and websites like, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. Although these three are classified under the same category, all three of these have their differences.
With Facebook, it’s an online social media that is used for the purpose of sharing your personal life with people you have chosen to be connected with. On this platform, you can write statuses, update your personal details, or even upload photos and videos. Essentially, Facebook is a platform used mainly for personal life usage. On the other hand, however, LinkedIn is an app that has the same concept, but for a business purpose. When someone uses LinkedIn, its for the purpose of a professional reason (i.e. Showcase who you are and the achievements you’ve accomplished, or the place you’re employed at). With this, you hold back on your private life, and focus on more of your title. The similarity between these two however is that they are both social media platforms used for sharing different details about you, professionally and or casually.
Besides Facebook and LinkedIn, the use of Twitter is completely different. Unlike the other two social media platforms, Twitter relies on the usage of “status updates” and the hashtag. When you send out a tweet about something, it is broadcasting that status to the world, if they choose to see it. Normally, the people who are tweeting can use the (#) key, followed by words to depict keywords that people can search up and find related status updates for them to see. By searching up a certain hashtag, you can find all the tweets about that certain topic in a matter of seconds and in the masses. Also, there is a feature on Twitter where one can see “What’s trending?”, which is something that shows how popular a certain keyword is.
The most important part of using twitter, as Ryan posted on his blog, is that twitter enables its users to freely make their own choices. Instead of restricting them to only certain voices, Twitter allows for people’s freedom of speech and a platform to post whatever they’d like and choose to. Not only is this a platform for the general population to use, but also world social leaders, who want to express what’s on their mind. By using social media, the can freely voice their opinions without having the tabloids fabricate and censor their thoughts to benefit themselves with more “exciting” exposure (Saez-Trumper, Castillo, & Lalmas, 2013).
As a generalization, all these social media platforms are communities that are built through multiple complex layers with mutual like-minded individuals. The outcome of this concept is a type of advanced communication that can be used throughout the web and around the globe (Renninger & Shumar, 2002).
It is because of this reason that people of higher authority rely on social media to convey their message. Since people in this generation are always on their electronics and most are on social media, you see more people of interest switching over to online campaigning or to send out messages to the masses of people in a matter of seconds and in real time. Not only do they use it for communication, but for connections. Since people are extremely valuable in a business perspective, they are widely seen as a source of knowledge resource (Wenger, 1998). It is because of this reason that social media is used, due to the unlimited amounts of connections to people could be created in a matter of minutes. Slowly, but aware, social media is a tool that is utilized more everyday by people and is being accepted as a valuable tool to convey information and is something that is starting to appeal to this generation. In the future, there should be no surprises if we see the same amount, if not more, of this social media heavy-influenced world we live in, in the present.
References:
Dabbagh, N., & Kitsantas, A. (2012). Personal Learning Environments, social media, and self-regulated learning: A natural formula for connecting formal and informal learning. The Internet and higher education, 15(1), 3-8.
Renninger, K. A., & Shumar, W. (Eds.). (2002). Building virtual communities: Learning and change in cyberspace. Cambridge University Press.
Saez-Trumper, D., Castillo, C., & Lalmas, M. (2013, October). Social media news communities: gatekeeping, coverage, and statement bias. In Proceedings of the 22nd ACM international conference on Information & Knowledge Management (pp. 1679-1684). ACM
Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of practice: Learning as a social system. Systems thinker, 9(5), 2-3.