Social not so much Media

Social media is defined as “websites and applications that enable users to create and share content or to participate in social networking”. It’s all the frenzy nowadays, we’re being surrounded by it and its frankly taking over. We live in an age that we can effectively communicate 24/7 with people all around the world about matters that would’ve been previously lost on us with people that we didn’t know exist and with demographics that we simply wouldn’t be inclined to talk to before its inception.

The creation of Facebook came in the dorms of Harvard university where a young Mark Zuckerberg got home from a date and set up a small website as a basic messenger with user profiles. This then turned into a network that was shared with universities around Harvard and then finally became the world’s largest social network, so large in fact that a 3% drop in its share prices meant a £2.9 billion loss.

The idea of social networks is one which is extraordinary for it can be used by different people in different medias for different things, LinkedIn is a social media more so used by businessmen and entrepreneurs who put up their CVs to attain new jobs whereas Snapchat, by contrast, is a social media that was used to send photos for a limited time to share memories briefly with loved ones and friends. However, we now live in a new age where social medias have morphed into this one colossal system which seems to be co-dependent on each other. The buying out and subsequent integration of social medias such as Instagram, Snapchat, LinkedIn by Facebook means a lot of overlap in the capabilities and therefore the demographics of these medias; from the log in page which prompts you to log in using your Facebook Id to the button at the corner of each post allowing you to share it across platforms means that there are no specified jobs that are associated with each social media and the previous age restrictions and the fears of social media are obsolete with the availability of smart devices and parents and guardians setting up accounts for their new-borns.

This is where the issue lies, however. We are all so certain of the security of social media that we oftentimes overlook the dangers. The recent case of a YouTuber who was banned from the site and suspended from many of his contracts due to posting a video with a dead person hung at the notorious ‘suicide forest’ in Japan shows that no one is safe; for the 11,000,000-strong following he had at the time comprised of mainly 12-15 year olds. The sad thing is that this individual wasn’t the first to do this and this horrific video wasn’t even the first of its kind on his channel alone. There are other cases to be made too where mild child pornography was used in channels based to teach and test out children’s toys. We are exposed to so much in the name of entertainment that it is hard to see what the effects are until it is too late, after all the fact that there is a tide pod challenge out recently where kids aged 11-19 bite on a laundry detergent for fun is ridiculous and this is because of the leniency of these websites and the crossovers which make it increasingly harder to control and censor content.

Now the reason that this becomes more of an issue is the fact that this creeps into our lives both socially as well as politically. After pondering on the recent extreme divisions between political positions and their causes the only possible solution I could come up with was social media. We all see the little box pop up on screen informing us of the use of ‘cookies’ which track our movements on websites. These cookies are mistakenly named, for they act as a hindrance. Not limited to social media, they extend to websites that you can shop on; a common example being airline websites within which these cookies are used to show higher prices for flights for they remember searches and the frequencies of them. What is more frightful is the fact that they are also used in social media; it is because of these cookies that we get what we see on our social media feeds. It is because of them that a conservative would get newspaper articles from the telegraph more often or more tweets or posts from people of a similar mind-set. This, with the combined power of social media oftentimes being the only news source of the younger demographic can shape many ideas in the heads of people that are hard to shake. These bilks are what fuel the disparities between parties and effectively place us in a bubble. We are boxed away and confined to our preferences and segregated more from one another and therefore more susceptible to being close minded and full of bilks. It is frankly ironic how such a media used to bring people together can then become the reason for such major disparity.