Social Media Change

How has social media changed communication? Social media has connected the world in more ways than they probably imagined while creating social media programs. Accessibility to Internet and being so easy, and pretty much all over the world besides in a few countries (China, North Korea) just to mention a few. You can now hear and read about problems in other countries/states before it hits the news channel. Most problems hit Facebook and other social media channels immediately following the occurrence. It is much easier to contact a person/people in another country than it was 5 years ago. We just jump onto the Internet and we are “connected”. So many things are done via social media.

 People are losing their interpersonal communication skills, because a lot of the communication nowadays is through social media and cell phones. Very few communication channels are done face to face. It is easier to throw out negative, degrading remarks over a website or in a chat than it is to say it to someone’s face. A great example is from an incident that occurred last night during an NBA regular season game. The defending champs Golden State Warriors returned to Cleveland to face the Cavaliers for a 2015 NBA championship rematch. There was a little scuffle between Lebron James and Stephen Curry. Nothing too intense but Curry ended up on the floor. On Facebook a video was posted and the comments just started getting heated. People throwing out their opinions, and of course everyone thinks that their opinion matters the most and they start getting defensive and throw out negative remarks to people they don’t know. It is interesting how feisty people can get online. Here is the link to the Facebook page the video was posted to https://www.facebook.com/NBAVines/?fref=nf. You can find example of this pretty much on any Facebook post.

If social media has changed how the world communicates this much in the last few years how much more will they be able to change it? Facebook has connected the world and I don’t see how much more we could connect the world. I guess people will just keep getting creative and throwing ideas out there to see if it works. Will the social media channels change? Facebook being the #1 social media channel right now, will they ever have a competitor?  According to ebizmba.com Facebook has over 1 billion users, and twitter being the second largest channel is only at 300 million users as of 2015.

http://www.ebizmba.com/articles/social-networking-websites