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How Social Media Makes Society

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How Social Media Makes Society
Let us take a trip into digital cyberspace and see what we will find. It is a never ending wonderland of bytes of data never before seen by men of different walks of life. Yes, dear reader, we can discover a whole new world in this digital frontier. However, is it worth it to venture the digital landscape if we could find out everything we ever needed to know on the social media landscape? Yes, it is. And in the end, it may be better to find out information outside of social media since social media leads to a possibility of spreading false information, a lack of privacy in one’s daily life, and a facilitation of endangering children through harmful social media sites. All in all, Social Media is more likely to do more evil for the society than it does justice. Forms of digital communication over the internet, such as social media, have become increasingly popular in information transmission since the dawn of the internet in the 1960s (Museum of Science and Industry). Today as of 2013, over 50% of people worldwide receive their information over common social media mediums such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube (Kidwali and Imperatore). Mediums such as radio, television, and print publication have slowly dropped in use. With this rapid increase in information being spread over social media, any individual with a decent understanding of the English language and a terminal to the greater World Wide Web can become just as credible as any well-established news source and therefore, publish a plethora of false information. In 2012, mass rumors broke out over scores of fires and gunmen in Mexico City. These rumors caused mass hysteria among the networks of Twitter and Facebook, causing the shutdown of several schools in Mexico and putting the police department in a “red alert” situation (Rodriguez). With over 50% of the population

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