Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
Reflection Paper
Online technologies and innovations have changed how people interact and socialize with
each other. Social media has allowed for new ways for people to interact and do business.
Different sites are growing every day and have changed the scape of social interactions. Social
media has been growing exponentially. New sites and new additions pop up every day. Social
media has provided a lot of advantages but has also led to some negative effects. These changes
It is no secret that social media continues to grow, As of January 2009, the online social
networking application Facebook registered more than 175 active user (Kaplan, Haenlein
2010). The number is even higher now as more and more people join social media sites. Twitter,
Snapchat, and Instagram are also very popular social media sites that continue to grow. Every
minute, ten hours of content is added to social media (Kaplan, Haenlein 2010). More and more
people every day rely on social media for news and entertainment.
Social media is a booming, growing industry with the potential to make exorbitant
amounts of money with its services. Social media has provided jobs for people. Companies hire
employees to run and monitor social media accounts. It has become a very serious business
strategy for serious businesses. Even local and small businesses have taken advantage of social
media to get their product out into the market. Social media has also expanded the tools and
strategies for communicating with customers (Mangold, Faulds 2009). Social media has wide
access to a variety of online forums, blogs, and other ways to communicate with consumers.
Instantaneously, businesses can get their message out to millions of followers all over the world.
The most successful businesses seem to have a strong social media presence. It appeals to a lot of
consumers.
Not only has social media allowed for new opportunities of connection to friends and
even people one does not know, it has become a subculture. Social media has allowed for people
to achieve stardom through being an online personality. As learned from class, people have found
ways to make money off of free sharing websites. These web celebrities gain fame and followers
in order to build up their brand. As the brand is built up they acquire advertisers that pay to use
their videos as platforms for advertisement. These web celebrities try to help other struggling
web celebrities by promoting each other. It seems like a great model, people helping people, but
ultimately the real winners are the advertisers, raking in most of the money.
The positives of social media are clear but there are negatives that can come from
it. The boom of social media has led to a reliance on it. Face-to-face communication has become
almost a secondary to communicating digitally. Today, also, teens are sharing more information
about themselves than ever before. Normally this information would be kept secret. According to
PewResearch:
It seems like there is now a generation of attention hungry teenagers that need to post things
online in order to feel good. Social media has created teens who are obsessed with their online
reputations and take unnecessary steps to ensure that they look cool online. There seems to be
an interest in likes. These teens will determine their online reputation on the amount of likes that
they have. According to Pew users will manipulate their profile in order to increase likes, as
well as remove photos with too few likes (Madden 2013). Parents are becoming increasingly
more concerned about advertisers access to their childrens information. Teenagers obsessed
with their online reputation can lead to unwanted information being posted online. Unwanted
online information can lead to trouble, as 19% of teens have admitted to regretting something
On top of a clear oversharing of privacy, social media can lead to a number of other
social problems for those who overuse it. Social media provides a block between people and face
to face communication. Out in public, one can see that most people are using social media rather
than looking up and talking to those around them. These kinds of people are going to struggle
with interpersonal face-to-face communication if habits do not change. The family dynamic can
also suffer changes as children would rather sit and look at their phones than spend time with
their family. In a way social media allows the public to be more social by giving more mediums
to connect with others, but without any medium, people seem to be unsure of what to do.
Clearly social media has led to a revolution in the communication age. It is no doubt that
it has had positive implications on society. It has added a whole new dimension to how people
communicate, consume products, do business, and consume content. Social media seems to be
less of an issue for people who are mature enough to handle it in the proper way. Teens however
are simply not educated enough to know the risks in posting information that would otherwise be
private. They are also unaware of how advertising companies can use what they post to learn
more about them. Social media adds a lot to the communication age. It is a positive thing, but
References
Madden, M., Lenhart, A., Cortesi, S., Gasser, U., Duggan, M., Smith, A., & Beaton, M. (2013).
Mangold, W. G., & Faulds, D. J. (2009). Social media: The new hybrid element of the promotion
Chicago
Kaplan, A. M., & Haenlein, M. (2010). Users of the world, unite! The challenges and