mukund shyam

Before diving straight into social media, lets first talk about what media is. Media is anything that helps mass communication. Traditionally, this referred to media like newspapers, radio, and news; but with the advent of the digital age, social media has gained a lot more power than traditional media. Traditional media, now, is moving to social media so that they don't get left in the dust.

Social media started off with the advent of blogging, a sort of public diary. People would share their opinions on blogs and forums, which evolved into platforms like myspace. Myspace was a direct ancestor of modern social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and many others. Other social media platforms like YouTube also came up around this time, in the late 2000s and early 2010s.

Social media has completely changed the world. Today, the second-most visited site in the world, after Google, is a social media platform: YouTube. Social media has changed jobs, language, privacy, communication, information, education, advertising, politics, products and even our offline experiences.

In the 2016 US Presidential Election, Russian agents organized political rallies all over the US by creating fake Facebook pages. Even though all the pages were fake, these political rallies actually happened. In the same boat, so many protests take place in the real world that are organized in the virtual world, using sites like Twitter. Even if you are not active on social media, what takes place in social media has really big consequences in the real world.

Social media has also fundamentally changed how we think of privacy. Any celebrity has basically no privacy on the age of the internet, and anyone can learn almost anything about them by just doing a simple Google search. And its not just celebrities that are facing a loss of privacy. Nowadays, big social media platforms and other platforms have a lot of information (data) about each and every one of us. Google or Facebook probably knows more about what we think and what we are interested in more than our own relatives do.

Well, one might wonder why all this data is important to these companies. This is because the world of advertising and products has changed considerably. Before the age of the Internet, if you wanted to learn what is happening in the world, you'd have to subscribe to a newspaper or buy cable TV. Nowadays, you can just Google it. But how do these reporters and news companies make money? They make money by advertising. A company would pay the news company or the platform (like YouTube) to display their ads on the site. The reporters, or the people who create the videos, get a chunk of that money, and the platform gets the rest. If these advertising companies (like Google and Facebook, 2 of the biggest ad companies in the world) know more about you, they know which ads are most likely you'll click on. If more people click on ads, these ad companies will get the best bang for their buck. And the only way these companies can know more about you is if they have as much of your attention as possible. The more time you spend on their site, the more they'll know about you, and the ads they serve you become more and more relevant. This is known as targeted advertising. The online economy is not an economy of attention or an economy of products; it is an economy of attention.

This targeted content has lead to something else: "filter bubbles". Since these companies know so much about you, they know exactly what content you like to consume and what content you interact with. If you enjoy a certain artist's music, they'll show you more music from that artist. But this also extends to other things. If you align with a certain political view, these algorithms will show you more and more content that aligns with your political belief. This leads you to not have exposure to other perspectives, so you are kind of in a bubble. This bubble is known as a filter bubble. If people from different filter bubbles interact, there's a likelihood for conflict to occur. People tend to be a lot more closed off due to filter bubbles.

Speaking of politics, social media has changed that too. Politics now requires a strong social media presence, and political ads are more common than ever. Hacking, or influencing elections has also become more common than ever before.

News has also been changed forever. Misinformation has become so prevalent that it has become hard to distinguish between what is right and what is wrong. Some people even propagate wrong information on purpose to throw the public off. These algorithms prioritize what could cause extreme reactions over what is true.

But the main thing social media has done to us is that it has made our opinions a lot more powerful. A normal person, from a normal background, can become famous because of social media. This is both a good and bad thing: potentially dangerous opinions could cloud truth and hurt our society as a whole. But a strong, helpful opinion can help and uplift the society.

So far I've been talking about social media like its completely bad, but I don't think it is. Social media has changed interactions between people, and (in rare cases, unfortunately), people from different parts of the world can change ideas and have a good discussion and debate. Old friends can reunite, relatives can interact, and friends who move away can still be in touch.

Social media has changed the way we view information and education. If you want to know any piece of information, you can just get it from social media. You can access centuries of research papers, textbooks, and theses. Before this, people would have to go to libraries and archives and sort through tons of folders. We've also gotten to the point where we can learn anything from the internet. I learnt everything I know about music production, guitar, filmmaking, photography, and video editing from social media. I think people underestimate social media and one's power to learn anything they want to from it. Before this, I would need to either find someone who can teach me or get a college degree to even know the basics of this stuff.

Social media has also changed jobs. It has changed the music and entertainment industries forever. You don't need a film degree or a music degree to become a successful filmmaker or musician. You don't need a deal from a record label to make it big in the music industry anymore. More and more talented people are getting the recognition they deserve for their work.

Social media has had a huge impact on our life. It has had smaller impacts, like the fact that it has changed language (acronyms are now words that are acceptable to use in conversation). But it has also had massive impacts on our lives. You don't have to be on social media to experience these impacts.

I researched this presentation on social media, and I'm sharing it to you now using social media.

Social media is an extremely powerful double edged sword. It can be used as a tool for creativity, learning, teaching, creating and communicating. But it can also be used as a weapon to spread hate in society. We now know the power of social media; its about time we learnt how to use it for good, and for good only.

Thanks for reading.