Social Media: The 21st Century Gold Mine

 

Social media, are interactive technologies that allow the creation or sharing/exchange of information, ideas, career interests, and other forms of expression via virtual communities and networks.” It can also be defined as an interactive web based application where by users interact with each other. 

Interacting with loved ones, friends and family, had been a concern for centuries. As human beings, we are social. People have always relied on communication to strengthen relationships.

 When meeting face to face or talking face to face seems impossible, we have thought and discovered many other creative ways that we can communicate over a long distance. So this brings me back to our history of how social media evolved over time.

The earliest form of communication across a long distance was a written correspondence delivered by a person to another. This was letter writing. The earliest form of postal service dates back to 550 B.C. In 1972, Telegraph was invented. This allowed messages to be delivered over a long distance, far faster than a horse and rider could carry them. The only issue with this was the Telegraph messages were short but they were a revolutionary way to convey news and information that is being sent from a distant location. 

The pneumatic post, developed in 1865, was a new method and way for letters to be delivered quickly among recipients.  

For those that don’t know, a pneumatic post can be described as pressurized air tubes to carry capsules from one place to another. The two most important discoveries happened in the 1800s. These are the telephone in 1890 and the radio in 1891. These two technologies are still in use till date, although, their modern versions are much more sophisticated than their predecessors.

Telephone lines and radio signals enabled people to communicate across great distances instantaneously, something that mankind had never experienced before. It was a break through. 

Subsequently, technology was changing rapidly in the 20th century. After the first super computers were created in the 1940s, scientists began to create networks between those computers which would later lead to the genesis of the internet.

The earliest form of the internet was compuserve which was developed in the 1960s. Compuserve is an online information service that provides access to internet, email and instant messaging and has an integrated contact list.

 By the 70s, networking technologies became better and in 1979, Usenet allowed users to communicate through a virtual newsletter. 

In the year 1980, home computers such as the desktop was becoming more common and social media at the same time was getting even more sophisticated. The first ever recognizable social media site was created in 1997 and it was called Six Degrees. It allowed users to create a profile and add friends with other users.

In 1999, the first blogging sites became popular, creating a social media sensation that’s still popular today. Blogger was created by Evan Williams and Meg hourihan which opened opportunities for people to publish online.

So social media today, after the invention of blogging, grew so much in popularity. Sites like MySpace, linkednl had so much prominence in the early 2000 and sites like Flickr, photobucket gave people the chance to share pictures.

 YouTube came out in the year 2005 creating opportunities for people to communicate and share information with each other and as well stream videos online across long distances. 

By 2006, Facebook and Twitter both became available to users throughout the world.

 These sites remain some of the most popular social networks on the Internet. Other sites like Tumblr, Spotify, Foursquare and Pinterest began popping up to fill specific social networking niches.

 Today, there is a tremendous variety of social networking sites, and many of them can be linked to allow cross-posting. This creates an environment where users can reach the maximum number of people without sacrificing the intimacy of person-to-person communication.

 Ever since the development and modernization of communication, social media has gained a lot of advantages and disadvantages. When it comes to the advantages, we can say social media reaches out to a large audience meaning that a large amount of people around the world use social media.

 It’s a great opportunity for your business to reach a large pool of people that are interested in your products or services.

 Social media gives you a direct connection with your audience. For example, you know who is interested in your business because they choose to follow your social media account.

 You get to know your customers better and you as well gain valuable insight about them.

 Lastly you can create organic content. The ability to post as much content as you want to engage your audience with no cost attached to it. 

On the other hand, when it comes to the disadvantages you can receive negative feedback from various people across the platform. For example you post a picture and receive negative comments which is form of cyber bullying.lastly. It can open up the potential for embarrassment. It’s easy for posts to go viral on social media. People keep a close eye on the good and the bad on social media. If you aren’t careful about the content you post, you can end up embarrassing your company and getting caught in an awkward situation.

Social media in the 21st century is considered the most important activity that helps to gain more experience due to the regular increase of internet users all over the world. The various social media platforms allows users or company’s to stay updated and as well connected. 

Due to these networks, social media has become the first information that users look at after waking up and before sleeping .

 A research has been conducted on the active users of the Social Media and found 1.23 billion of the users that actively participate in the large amount of Social Media usage including all platforms. It has encouraged standard communication methods that helped in the rapid development of the technology.

Today as we speak, there are amazing varieties of social media networking sites and many of them allow cross posting which is a platform where by users reach out to a large amount of people without sacrificing the intimacy of person to person communication. 

We can only speculate about the future of social media in the next 100 of years from now, but it seems clear that it will always exist in some form for as long as humans are alive.

Adeyinka Babatolu Mbanefo

Computer science

OS/20B/1624