Entering the realm of Social Media…

We’ve arrived. It’s week 3 of semester 1 and the blog posting has begun. This assignment, for the paper Social Media Networks for Business, requires us students to delve into the vast realm of Social Media and Web 2.0. But this begs an all important question: Where do you even start?!

Social Media arrived in 1997, and the world has never looked back. Social Media has become such an all consuming concept in the lives of millions of people, that I believe it’s safe to assume that most people don’t remember life without being able to check their social media accounts every 5 minutes.

The main benefit of Social Media’s prevalence in our lives today is how much easier communication has become. Forget pigeon post, telegraphs and posting letters into a letter box. That has become the ancient communication methods of  yesteryear. Why go to all that effort, when now you can flick off a text, fire off 20 emails at once, and send a silly photo of your face to a friend on the other side of the world – instantly.

The huge impact that Social Media has on our lives can be seen in so many ways. Just the mere fact that you are reading my blog right now shows that you are a part of a huge digital footprint that has so rapidly taken the world by storm. Social Media “phrases” and “slang” are such a huge part of society now. People actually say “LOL” instead of actually laughing at something. People get personally offended if a photo doesn’t garner a large amount of likes. It seems that people have become so dependent on Social media now that they need to have accounts on as many websites as possible so they can attain some personal validation that they fit in, and are a contributing member of society because they post photos of themselves on Instagram.

My next post will look at the history of Social media and a variety of other questions about how Social media can support businesses in this new Socio-Technical age we have entered into since the dawn of the internet.

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