| Our generation has grown up with technology and is used to always having it and being around it. Even though we started out with much slower or bigger, we know what it is like to constantly be 'plugged in' or 'connected.' This is definitely something that has completely altered the way that the world works and communicates, from the biggest companies to a few words exchanged via text by friends. In this modern age it is hard to remember a time when social media didn't play a crucial role in our lives. While Facebook merely started as a small website to connect Harvard students to one another, it has become a multi-billion dollar industry. Now sites like Facebook and Twitter have various advertisements and celebrity users can make millions by endorsing products on these social networking sites. In keeping with celebrities' influential power, social networking can be used to help better the world. Influential people can Tweet about various causes or charities they believe in, which helps to get their cause recognized. Social Media allows people to interact in ways we could never imagine without it. People don't have time to have an hour long telephone conversation everyday with multiple people. It is very easy to catch up on someone's life through a simple message on the computer, even email. Social Media enables a route of communication not just for personal life but for businesses, purchases, and anything you can basically imagine. Businesses have boomed due to advertisements or media sites because they get the word out quicker and faster. People hardly read the ads in the newspaper now, the world revolves around online communication and advertising on a website such as Twitter or Facebook makes people notice because that is where their primary focus is now. Social networking websites have helped to transform everyday people into red carpet-walking celebrities with their own reality shows (for better or for worse of course) and similarly, it has the ability to heighten the awareness of the smallest initiatives with the biggest potential to change the world. Social media has made the world even smaller. With the help of sites like facebook, twitter and linkedin, people hundreds of miles away from one another can connect and communicate. Social media has made it possible for companies to reach out to clients who may live on the other side of the country -- or even on the other side of the planet. As a marketing tool, it is a definite game changer. Today, we can Skype our friends/ colleagues on different continents, use Twitter to track for global trends, manage our multiple email accounts from our smartphones, coordinate with fellow professionals on LinkedIn, share photos and stories from last night on WhatsApp, launch a brand on Instagram, create a community on Facebook, get breaking updates from our news apps, order a taxi to the office with Uber and monitor our daily calorie usage with our FitBit. And we can do all of these things without even getting out of bed. Social media has its negative side as well. Instead of learning something new, or engaging in exercise, Indian teen's hangout on Facebook, share their selfies and comments and spend a lot of time on unproductive activities. Result is low intellect and poor physical shape. Office workers use social media during work hours. This distracts them from work and makes them unproductive. Every person with a smartphone and an Internet connection has access to social media all the time -- on your PC, on mobile, at the cafe, while travelling, while resting at home, etc. This has made addicts out of many urban Indians. Such addiction eats into free time and disrupts sleep, kills confidence, causes stress and much more. Having access to people's lives at all times is not always a good thing. A new trend of cyber bullying is wreaking havoc all across the world. This is especially true with young kids. They are publicly harassing one another, and posting mean or slanderous things which are broadcasted to the entire cyber world. One of the biggest problems with the social media craze is that people are becoming more and more addicted to using it. It is the number one time waster at work, in school, and at home. All of this has caused people to have literal withdraws from their social networks. In a nutshell we can say that if the social media is being used in discipline, it will definitely bring a revolution otherwise our young generation may perhaps falls under the prey or trap of it. |
