Social Media is the way we interact with each other whether it is sending pictures of your math homework or tagging someone in a spongebob meme, it has impacted us so much over the years. The earliest form of social media was the postal service which dates back all the way to 550 B.C. and gradually become more widespread in future centuries. There is many pros in how social media has influenced society especially in the past 20 years, but social media has the cons too. Social media isn’t just used for entertainment purposes it is used a lot in the business industry and it gives workers more opportunities, and can potentially attract more customers than ever before which can increase the stocks of a certain brand which is extremely beneficial but it doesn’t mean that the company will always have increasing stocks but it can help slow down the declining rate.
The postal service is the first form of social media dated way back to 550 B.C at that time it was the only way you could even communicate to people who lived far away from you, it took centuries upon centuries for the next form to appear which is quite mindblowing if I would say! It took all the way from 550 B.C to A.D 1792 when the first telegraph was invented, and people could finally get messages instead of letters, and people can get the latest news, and information received by a far distance but at that time there was no way to receive any messages from overseas because it would require a cable to be so long enough that it would go from New York to London and cables weren’t a thing at that time. As the late 1800s to early 1900s came social media started to rise at a much higher rate, same thing goes with technology the 20th century saw dramatic changes with society and the way we receive news, messages, and how we communicate with others globally. (Hendricks, “Social Media before 1900”.)
The year 1997 marks the birth of digital social media and its called Six Degrees which lasted 1997-2001, it allowed users to create a account and add friends which is what we still do today with instagram or alternative sites. Six degrees made people start becoming bloggers and made the internet more usable because in 1990-1996 there were no social media or any form of instant messaging, therefore the internet was very unneccesary to own without it. The first blog was created by Jorn Barger who titled his blog “Robot Wisdom”. After 1997 entering towards the 2000s social media has exploded dramatically in 2000 100 million people had internet access and more people are utilzing chat rooms such as AOL, in 2003 MySpace was very popular and suprisingly lots of musicians had MySpace so people could digitally listen to their albums and people in businesses connected with each other so they could get more opportunities and socialize with collegues. Mark Zuckerberg was the social media king after he launched Facebook for the students at Havard in 2004 he saw the potential the students will have if they start using this service, Facebook is still popular today but as shown recently Instagram has been taking over due to increased mobile use upon many users of all ages, same goes for twitter with its 500 million users. (Keith, “2005: Facebook and Twitter”) As of today there is now thousands of social media platforms most of them have the same kind of service but there is some differences in each one, now social media has impacted our lives so much that is almost unusual to see someone or a business not using them. There is too much social media platforms to name everyone knows a majority of the services. (Keith, “Social Media Today”.) What is very interesting to see what the future holds for social media we don’t know exactly what else can change our lives forever but one thing we know for sure is, is that for as long as humanity survives social media will never permanently die off forever
Based on statistics recently 9 to 10 internet users visit a social media platform at least once a month, and the average user spends about 4.5 hours a day watching. The only social media trend that is decreasing is web-based email among those who are under the age of 55, same goes for facebook as many younger generations are leaving to find a more recent a trendy type of app or site and those over the age of 55 are using facebook more especially most of those users are women, so based on these statistics it looks like all generations are using at least a platform or two which pretty much shows that social media is never going to fade especially since most of the younger generations have grown up with it or at least saw it starting to take a huge toll on business and everyday life. (Mcfadden, “A Chronological History of Social Media”).
I am very interested to see what social media is going to be like in the future and how we will look back 15-20 years from now and laugh at what we were doing in our day to day lives comparing to what we are doing at that time. Since social media is so integrated into our lives that people are making legit money on social media such as being a Twitch streamer or filming daily vlogs on YouTube, it is almost like saying that social media is a new way of working and traditional jobs and fading away due to people perfurring digital work rather than the physical. An example of this is like instead of sending a letter to your boss or co-workers they can all chat in a group message or individually talk digitally
