The Rise of Social Media
Social media has a profound impact on the society. We use it to stay connected with our friends and family, to share our thoughts and experience, and also to buy or sell products as well as services. Overall, social media has become a great part of our day-to-day life. So, with a great attachment to social media in an individual’s life, it can bring positive as well as negative impacts on an individual or society as a whole.
History of Social Media
The history of social media can be traced back to the early days of the internet when the internet was new and people began to use online bulletin boards and chat rooms to communicate with each other. In the 1990s, online communities like six degree and Friendster emerged. These early social media were limited in their functionality but laid the foundation for the social media giants today.
The first major social media platform to achieve widespread popularity was MySpace. Launched in 2003, MySpace allowed users to create personal profiles, share photos and videos, and connect with friends. MySpace was eventually surpassed by Facebook, which was launched in 2004. Facebook quickly became the most popular social media platform in the world, with over 2 billion active users.
Other popular social media platforms include Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, and LinkedIn. Each platform has its own unique features and appeal. Twitter is known for its short, “tweet” messages, while Instagram is focused on sharing photos and videos. TikTok is popular for short-form videos, and LinkedIn is a professional networking platform.
The positive impact of social media
In today’s time, social media has caused many positive impacts on our daily life. Social media is helping us to learn the world around us. By just opening a social media app on our cellphones we can follow and know the latest news about organizations, celebrities, and many other related fields.
· Social media can help us stay connected with friends and family. In this busy world, spending time with family and friends might be a difficult task for some of us. So, social media has been helping us to stay connected with our friends and family who are living far from us through chats, video calls, posts, and photos.
· Social media can be a platform for activism. Not only for staying connected with friends and family but also for spreading awareness about important issues and organizing protests and other events social media is a really great platform.
· Social media can help us connect with people who share our interests. Let’s say you are a freelancer searching for a job, or a company searching for a suitable candidate for a specific job. What can be the easiest way to search for a potential job or potential candidate? Social Media, right? There are a lot of pages and groups on social media where you can find your choice of jobs or a candidate with the flexibility of time and money.
There are many more positive impacts of social media. But with a lot of positiveness comes some amount of negative impact as well.
The negative impact of social media
There are many negative impacts of social media as well. Some of them are;
· Social media can be addictive. With lots of content to watch on social media, an individual can be easily spending hours scrolling through posts and videos or checking through notifications and feeds. This can lead to anxiety and depression, which is a serious medical problem.
· Social media can be used to spread misinformation. We can see lots of news on social media, many of them are true, and many of them are false. The right news and information can be helpful to everyone, but the negative ones can be a bad influence on someone who might accept them as true. Not everything that we see on social media is real or true, so you need to know which information to acquire by filtering the negative ones.
· Social media can be a breeding ground for cyberbullying. With the rise of users in social media platforms, there rise in the case of cyberbullying as well. Cyberbullying is when someone uses social media to harass or bully another person. This can have a really bad effect on the victim’s mental health.
With all the positive and negative impacts social media acts as how you take the information on yourself. If you find it offensive and problematic, it’s bad likewise if you take it as a positive informative platform, it’s good.
Conclusion
Overall, social media is like a coin; it has two sides, a positive side as well as a negative side. The most important thing about social media is how you take the information to yourself. Many of us have benefited from social media whereas many have been depressed as well. At last, don’t be a bully to anyone on social media, or don’t just get bullied by someone on social media. You can report to the cyber bureau if you are being cyberbullied. Be kind to everyone you find on social media and be helpful to everyone.
