Social Media: What about it?
Hey you! Yes, you!
You’re probably reading this right now asking yourself; am I really about to have a conversation with an invisible voice through a screen?
Well, yeah pretty much! It’s essentially what people have been doing since the beginning of social media — communicating.
Why, you might ask? Because social media is what brings us together. It’s a collection of websites and applications that link together to create and share content to its users — A network if you may.
But it wasn’t always like that was it? The first known Social media site was a platform called “Six Degrees” in 1997. It was a simple ‘web of contacts’ model that allowed users to upload a profile and make friends with other users who made use of the site.
Before that most people would socialize through physical meet ups; in the street at the supermarket, on the bus and anywhere you could make physical contact with people really. But that wasn’t just it. The very first invention of the telephone in 1875 and later, the mobile phone in 1973, meant that you could now communicate with another person from a completely different place as you … without even seeing them.
Calling turned into texting and texting eventually turned into statuses, similar to the ones you would find on Twitter and Facebook.
Facebook’s initial default question when starting a status is: What’s on your mind? This is because the intention for such status posts is to spark conversation. In turn, the platform now has a purpose of communicating your post to your ‘friends’. Socializing made easy, right?
The legendary Greek philosopher Aristotle explained how:
Our actions prove to show how we indeed cannot live in isolation of each other as we continuously feed on learning more about each other on a daily basis — a very fine line between that and being all up in everyone’s business, but that’s a blog for another time.
So, to summarize, as social beings we have created our own ways of adapting and overcoming. We look forward to finding more about each other and in turn, feed social media platforms with information about ourselves to allow others to gain information about us — even if though no one really cares what you ate at that seafood restaurant last Thursday … unless they do …
We’ll be looking at the function of social media and how it correlates with who we are in next week’s blog post!
Until then, Adieu!
This blog is a project for Study Unit DGA3008, University of Malta
