Not So Social Media

Dating back to the stone age, 2010, 13-year-old Elise joined Facebook on her iPod Touch, not to the knowledge of either of her parents. It was a different world back then, mostly populated with teenagers and college students- there were no grandparents and no great grandparents and the newsfeed wasn’t overrun with advertisements and fake news articles. Since those days, there has been a drastic transition in the way social media is used. It is no longer just a way to share your life, your food and your cat pictures with your friends on the internet. Every major social media network now has the capabilities to be used as major business platform. Not to say that there still aren’t great social opportunities on these networks, because there are. How else would you know what that girl you sat next to in your sophomore year English class is doing with their life?  

While there are negative possibilities and connotations related to social media, we can’t go onward without addressing the positives as well. During past natural disasters, people in distress have utilized social media to alert their friends and family of their location, and spread word of just how bad storms are to the rest of the Internet and population. While that is the case again with the wrath of Hurricane Dorian hitting Florida and the Carolinas sometime this week, other people on Twitter address the location of Trump during this trying time, where they found him playing golf during his tweet hiatus. There lies one of the beauties of social media, the undeniable transparency it allows the general population. It seems as if every week another person is “canceled” or receiving backlash about something someone found about them on the web. While this gives people accountability about what they post online and do in public settings, it’s hard to decide if it’s right to ruin someone’s career over a tweet from 2011. 

In the future, who knows what social media can and will become. There will probably be new platforms that take over once Twitter and Instagram become over run with grandparents just like Facebook. One thing that probably won’t change is the way business is done through these networks. Brands have just gotten better and better at targeted marketing and that probably won’t change at anytime soon. If any change were to occur, niches would narrow more and more, demographics would be targeted better and business tactics would more tactful. The downfall of social media is nowhere in sight. For many people and younger generation social media takes up hours in a day. So does that mean it’s a bad thing that it’s becoming very business oriented? Many people have a career is based entirely on the Internet and on social media. Some people earn millions by “influencing” others- writing blog posts, making YouTube videos-the list goes on and on. Just like that’s something we could’ve never imagine ten years ago, we can’t quite imagine what the future holds.