What is Social Media?

Social media is a term that all of us are familiar with. Aren’t we? Well to explain that categorically, one simple question goes out in the open, what exactly is social media? The answers would inexplicably vary, to some it is a platform to share their daily activities online, to some maybe a way of spending most of their time interacting with friends and relatives while for others it is just an online portal of information. Whereas there are people who feel most alive whenever they are on social media! A few common examples of social media are of course Placeamark, Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, Whatsapp, and the list goes on and on. Placeamark is a brand new cool social network where you can share locations and find out where your friends are in real-time. Unfortunately, it is only available for iOS. So if you have an iOS device you can check the app out: placeamark.com

Out of these the most popular is the facebook wherein one can connect with anybody sitting in any part of the world. Facebook has given access to places people things and also the whereabouts of most of their friends.

According to a statistical data facebook has around 2,047,000,000 users making it the mostly used social media platform in the world.

Purpose of Social Media

Humans are social animals therefore the need to interact with other people is naturally imbibed within us and the very purpose of expression that is a tool through which one can vent out their feeling that makes us humans in totality. Earlier the medium was through letters and postcards, now it is done through the instrumentality of social media.

Timeline

To ponder a little upon the history, the first of its kind of an invention was the telegraph in the year 1792 that allowed the messages to be delivered to longer distances, then came the telephone and the radio in the year 1890 and 1891 respectively. With the advent of time and rapidly changing technology in the 20th century communications and interactions took a more sophisticated avatar and gave us a virtual time interaction with the people popularly known as the social media. What many people don’t know is that the very first social media platform that allowed people to interact and make profiles and friends was not facebook but a website called six degrees in the year 1997.

New World Order

Social media has given the world a new dimensions to thrive upon and to realise and exactly know what is going on in the world at this very moment that I write this article or next you reading it. It wouldn’t be wrong to say that half the world runs on advertising and advertisements and social media has given it a newer heights and golden forum for any company to expand and popularise its business. With the influx of new marketing strategies and mutually benefitting user friendly market it has become a lot more easier to not just interact with people but to even buy thing and avail online shopping facility while sitting at home. The e commerce industries are ranked among the top notch companies of the world generating immense wealth and economy some of it even greater that the GDP of smaller countries.

Advantages of Social Media

On the educational front also the impact of social media have made kids smarter these days, since the awareness among students have grown manifold than what it used to be probably 15-20 years ago. Everything is so readily available on the internet that one gets to know about any process, nomenclature, patterns in short ANYTHING that one can practically fathom, however the credibility of such information is always subjective and debatable. Every small activity, be it filing for online applications to college admission to paying off the bills, everything is now been taken care of and there are also proper governmental agencies to make sure nothing goes wrong.

Social Media Negative Impact

But the stigma related to all good things is that not everything about being good is good and therefore social media can have disparaging harmful effects on any individual. Mostly people interact with each other under the garb of a certain platform and that may lead to heated arguments when it comes to dissent on a certain issue and could therefore lead to hostility and enmity. A lot of times a certain sect of the society have used social media as a tool to widen their stance on certain issues such as religion, caste etc and India being a sensitive nation has had to endure severe backlash. Anybody can propagate and disseminate false rumours which may lead to hostility among a few members of the society resulting in violence and clashes not realising that the root of such antagonism is social media.

Conclusion

To sum up, social media has immensely benefitted people belonging to all age groups, as they have started to feel more and more active and exuberant by the fact that one can interact with their friends and relatives sitting in any corner of the world. But also one cannot forget that at times what deprives you of loneliness can in turn render you feeling lonelier.