For me, social media is one of the greatest advancements of our time. It has made the world a much smaller place and communication between people more effective. Platforms such as Twitter and Facebook, who has more than 800 active users (facebook.com), allow communication and interactions, a sharing of views, ideas, likes and dislikes. People in the workforce no longer have to travel by plane to see clients, they can hold meetings over Skype. Texting has become an addictive habit for many. There will be 8 trillion text messages sent in 2011 (mobithinking).
YouTube has created overnight sensations. Look at Justin Beiber and his instant celebrity. You don't need to wait for the record to drop or the cd to be released, you can download his music from iTunes and carry it around on your iPod.
Traditional forms of news are being replaced with an online presence. Newspapers and magazines are going digital to stay alive. Wikipedia has become the new research tool. You don't need to go to the library to look at the Encyclopedia Britannica anymore. This dependency on the Internet does have a downside. With Wikipedia going offline for 24 hours, there was a huge public outcry. How were people going to get their facts checked? (Globe & Mail)
New forms of technology are rapidly replacing the old. Televisions have gone from mammoth black and white sets with only a few channels to small handheld devices that connect viewers to thousand of downloading options. You can carry your television with you wherever you go and text your friends at the same time.
Are we loosing our ability to interact face to face? Will we only be able to express ourselves through an online presence? Will we still know how to write and use the English language to effectively communicate? Do we really need to know what celebrities are doing at all hours of the day?
Food for thought.
Sources:
facebook.com/press.info
Globe and Mail, Wednesday January 18, 2012; Globe Life section "Online Protest"
mobithinking.com/mobile-marketing
Your questions are very interesting and i have been wondering the same thing. You look at social media and celebrities are everywhere you look. The tabloids are always filled with them like they have no sense of privacy or could it even be true? No one ever really knows. All of your thoughts are true and they are proven facts because if you were to survey our social media class more than 80% of them will probably say that they use some form of social media without even knowing it. Most internet tools involve some sort of social media in this time period. Like you said all of these tools we used to use have become in a quicker and have easier access points. I mean now you just log on a computer and surf the encyclopedia on the web, along with articles, and periodicals to do your research rather than having to go search for a paper back copy. Sometimes it makes you wonder how we got to where we are, and it is kind of scary to imagine what the world will be like a 50 years from now. Most people who send text messages use shortcuts for words instead of writing out the whole word, but then if your texting someone who was born way before the dawn of cellphones and texting abilities they would look at your text and just see a bunch of gibberish and have no idea what so ever what in the world you’re talking about. So for some the advances in technology come easy for others it's the worst thing that could have ever happened to the world we live in. But without social media most of us would have a hard time finding an old friend, colleague, or even someone you knew from school that you haven't seen in ages. You take Facebook search the name and it's like time stops because you can't believe your eyes. So really what would you do without social media?
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