How Social Media Is Changing the Way We Communicate What is the first thing you would do if your city’s power went out? Would you light a candle? Reach for a flashlight? Or would you run for your cell phone? Most of us would choose the last option, but without power, most cell phones become useless due to lack of service. Imagine, no connection to the world outside your house. No FaceBook, no Twitter, no Instagram or Pinterest. For most, including myself, that would be a nightmare. As much as it pains me to admit, I am an avid user of all of these social networks. It is interesting to think that there once was a time when writing letters, using only home phones or physically going to see a person were the only means of communication, a time that recent generation children will only learn about from reading history books, or hearing from their families. Today I am going to talk about the good, the bad and the ugly aspects of social networks. The good being origins and advantages, the bad being disadvantages and the ugly being the dangers of social networking.
In today’s society, where technology is the driving force for almost everything, there is no escaping social networking. Whether it’s being told to follow someone on Twitter, taking a photo and uploading it to Instagram or finding out more information about a company through it’s FaceBook page, you can do almost anything with the help of social networking. We have all heard of these social networking outlets, but they were not the first in the business. According to an article A Brief History of Social Media, ‘the first social networking website was SixDegrees which let people make profiles and connect with friends in 1997. This kind of interactive, social web application style became popularly known as “Web 2.0” and it really gained momentum with Friendster around 2002, followed by MySpace (2004 – 2006)