The Future Of Social Media

The Future Of Social Media

 

How do you think social media will change in the future?  What other trends would you add to the mix? Are they any specific technologies that you think will gain popularity or emerge? 

Our generation has been lucky to enough to actual witness the complete growth of social media. We were there at the beginning when MSN and MySpace and then soon Facebook, literally took the world by storm. We were there when MySpace began an online world where you were able to share your music and pictures with friends and fans. Facebook soon changed the world of social media. It began an online community based around album sharing, discussions, events and sharing your own thoughts. Over the years, we’ve been introduced to game changing social media sites. Twitter began a movement of actually knowing celebrities and others whereabouts and what other people are experiencing constantly. Flikr and Instagram allow you to share your photos with people literally everywhere around the world. Our generation has come a long way with experiencing and developing new social medias.

I definitely think social media will continue gaining popularity. You can already see the increase in promotion of social medias. You literally can’t watch the nightly news or literally even any news shows without the hosts giving you their twitter handle. Even politicians promote their Facebook/Twitter pages. Social media will continue changing and become more attractive to demographics not yet using it. Its growing popularity is wide spread and will only encourage developments and new technology on the forefront of social media outlets.

I think in the future, a huge advancement that will come about, will be WiFi accessibility virtually anywhere. I think the capability is there, and it will finally make social media completely accessible 24/7, 365 days of the year.  I think in the future will definitely witness social media being easier to access and easier to use. Our generation must continue building on the foundation we have. I think there will also be advancements on the devices we use social media on. Devices over the last couple years have been created basically just for social media use. For example, the Apple iPad is basically just a portal for all your social media outlets (Facebook, Twitter, photo sharing sites, Sound Cloud, messengers etc.) I also think we’ll witness some advancement in the music social media sites. There are a couple sites that have become popular over the years but not one distinct social music site has emerged.

I think we’ve only seen the beginning of what social media can do for us….it will continue changing how we communicate with each other and the rest of the world.

Weak Ties vs. Real Social Change

BLOG #3

 

According to Malcom Gladwell, a well-known author in the area of social media, social media are built around weak ties and real social change can never come from loose networks of people that do not know each other. Do you think that social media has the potential to bring about real social change?

I definitely think social media takes a lot of the responsibility out of real social change. It has become extremely easy to click a button and all of a sudden support a cause without actually doing anything else. Not to say that this doesn’t help. Some national change campaigns are built around the idea of simply just tweeting a certain ‘hashtag’ which usually sends a financial donation to the known cause. An example of this even happened a couple weeks ago with the Bell Let’s Talk campaign.  Bell would donate 5 cents for every tweet with the hashtag BellLetsTalk, Facebook share, texts and long distance calls (made on a bell phone) on February 12^th 2013. There were over 96,266,266 tweets etc. which led Bell to donate over 4.8 million dollars to Canadian Mental Health. It definitely set an unprecedented national conversation, and nearly everyone on Twitter/Facebook that day either tweeted or shared something to do with it. It showed how powerful using social media can be and how easily it can involve and reach people around the country. 

But unfortunately it can also be overwhelming the amount of causes and campaigns that are floating around social media sites. Its virtually so easy to say you like every program or campaign trying to make a difference around the world, but sometimes no one’s actually doing anything or supporting them, even financially. Remember Kony 2012? When word of this campaign first got out, everyone on Facebook and Twitter quickly and rapidly began supporting it. For weeks, Facebook pages were being created, people were tweeting Kony 2012 rally dates etc. but unfortunately when the day arrived, barely anyone did anything. It created a false hope. I think maybe the idea has to happen quickly. If you want social change it has to happen fast. You can’t hope the support or followings of social media will continue giving you attention after a couple weeks. Our generation gets bored quickly and we move onto other fads or interesting things people are talking about.

Quantity vs. Quality

QUANTITY vs. QUALITY

Social media has definitely increased the QUANTITY of news and information but I don’t think it has necessarily increased the QUALITY of it. Literally anyone can publish anything on social networks. I guess it has increased the quality, in the fact, it has made news and information much more accessible and innovative. The quality has always been there in news and reporting…. It’s always been reliable and trustworthy, but now it reaches people faster and on many different levels. But I don’t think the quality of the actual news or information has generally increased. CNN has always been a world leader in delivering important news and global information and they continue to do so, just at a faster and more convenient ways (Twitter, video podcasts etc.) I don’t think the quality of news and information has decreased though either. I just believe you can’t trust everything you read, because virtually anyone can post something online via a social network, claim its breaking news, and it be a total lie. Social networks have made it so easy to gather copious amounts of information from anywhere around the world. Social networks have created nothing but channels of news and information and it has no signs of slowing down in the future. This means we’ll keep hearing and reading world news faster and easier as the years go on and technology advances. It is important to know what sources to get your information from and which ones you trust. There are a lot of social media users spreading rumors and false facts around the internet. Use Wikipedia as an example. We all know we use it (yes…. Even for University essays) and believe everything that’s posted on it even though we know anyone can add information to it. Social media has definitely opened the doors for way more news and information but you have to be smart… trust your sources… and keep learning as much as you can from the rest of the world! TWEET ON!!

Social Media Wasteland