Guest Blog: A Decade of Social Media
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Over a decade ago when people first started logging into social media, all you could really do was stay in touch with friends and family. And at the time, that’s all people wanted it for. However, over the years, social media has blossomed into a network of information, events, and people from all around the world. Now when I log into Facebook or Twitter, I’m not just seeing which bottle of wine my auntie had opened that evening, I’m looking into a window of society. Social media has become a way of life for many people. For some, their businesses or charities rely completely on how rapidly information travels from one page to another. People buy and sell, they donate money to those who ‘Brave The Shave’, and they can even find fame, all through social media. The Facebook app has even recently added ‘The Marketplace’ so that users from around the country can easily buy and sell things without even needing to search for a specific page or person. With an estimated 1.28 billion people logging into Facebook alone, every day, it’s a smart move. If you want to get a message across to a lot of people, social media is the way to do it. Everyone from political parties to suicide prevention lines, use social media to get people’s attention and establish an audience from the huge variety of users across the world. For example, in the most recent British election, The Labour Party used social media for a lot of their campaigning, and therefore managed to catch the attention of young adults to expand their support. They now have around 1,006,795 people following their pages. The popular Facebook page ‘Jamie’s World’ started out as merely a teenage girl posting short and funny videos on a page she made for her friends; it now has 9,465,250 people following from all around the world, allowing her to become a full-time entertainer. Social media can be used to raise awareness and helps to keep the public informed on what it is going on around the world and even how they can help people from their own homes. Celebrities, for instance, on Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter can show their thousands of fans which organizations they are involved with, inspiring their followers to volunteer to help or even give money to the cause. The celebrities are able to educate on why they are supporting an organization and display which items to buy in order to contribute cheaply. Social media, while a great step forward, can also be a large step backwards as, unfortunately, the wide range of people who can access it will include those who are there to spread hate throughout the internet and into the world. For the people who sit behind their computers or phones for no other reason than to tear someone down, social media can be a playground. For a while, the anonymity of the internet allowed people to say whatever they wanted without consequence. Which was greatly concerning for many who then shied away from logging on. In recent years a control system has been put into place meaning that the ‘Internet Trolls’ can be stopped and even imprisoned depending on what they have said.
