The Influence of Social Media

In this chance I would like to share my opinion about how social media can influence our life. I clearly remember when I just start playing social media when I was in junior high school, Friendster.

Do we remember how we interact with our personal computer and our willingness to pay rental computer hour by hour? Friendster rule social media around 2006 – 2008 if I am not mistaken.

Customize page facility that makes us diligently change the profile such as background in our Friendster wall and also give long description of us until we request our friends to provide testimonials each other.

Especially with the facility “who's viewed me” who used to really make us curious if there are somebody spy on us. We feel that by having more friends on Friendster and the more people who see our Friendster profile, we feel more and more proud of it unconsciously.

Friendster booming until early 2008 before the presence of Facebook. The second stage of social media is Facebook, this social media become famous from around 2007-2010 when I was in senior high school.

The user interface is more friendly than Friendster in that time with blue as dominated color. The basic principle is still the same, there is interaction with one user to another with their own profiles that tend to be the same but with no customize page as in Friendster.

Facebook have more features than Friendster, with a group feature to facilitate a group of people from the same school, college and work moreover also it can be used for buying and selling forums.

There are also facilities to play online games and there are facilities to share more photos and videos. But still with the concept of the more friends you have the higher your social media rating.

The next one is Twitter, this social media booming from 2009-2012. It quite different with the 2 predecessors, Twitter use concept with less photo and video share, no customize page at our profile but use more comment facilities.

We have only 144 characters to tweet and mention somebody. We can make discussion using that facility. In my opinion Twitter is the best social media because the tendency to have more friends not only based on the photos and videos that we share but what kind of discussions or topics we often talk about and that is represent the sense of social media.

Time flies along with advanced digital technology with cameras and videos are having good quality then in 2012 - 2015 appeared social media named Path. Path more highlight in share of photos and videos instead of conversation. 

We can share like what is our current activity with share photos, our current location, the song that we are currently listening to, even we can update when we start to sleep and wake up.

The good things in the path is We can be selective in choosing friends because there are only 500 friends who can enjoy our photos and videos, so we can choose our own friend that they can be a circle in our path

Actually this is good to strengthen the relationship with our friends especially those who have rarely met. We can know the latest news about their current information as well as other social media, but with more highlight in feature photos and videos sharing will be more likely to show off instead of sharing information.

This condition is not in accordance with the basic principles of social media and it’s exacerbated by the presence of Instagram in the year of 2014 until this day.  In Instagram the main feature is not only to share photos but also “Snapgram” it’s like footage video of our activity.

Instagram is different with path because there are no limitation of our friend, so the problems that exist on Friendster and Facebook was repeated here “More followers, better”.

Those are influence of social media in personal user. Beside that there are so many user of social media that utilize their social media account into online business both in the form of goods and services that is really impactfull nowadays.

Based on the research people usually spent 135 minutes each day usage of social media (Statista, 2018). You can imagine how influence the social media to promote online business since online transaction are getting easier lately.

Not only conduct online business also social media as a tool to show off our photos and videos which does not appear when social media does not exist, with the increasing usage of social media people more appreciate on the artwork that is eye catching.

There is also a social media used for endorse with personal accounts that have an enormous number of followers, even some people are willing to buy followers to become “famous”.

There are also bad effect from utilize of social media that are used to influence other people with bad intentions such as doing slander to a certain person, even some party are paid to create social media accounts that are destined to spread slander.

So the conclusion is a lot of impact given with the presence of social media in human life, based on my explanation earlier please take good points and please leave bad points.

Use social media as wise as possible and do not let social media interfere with our real life, social media will continue to change and grow in the future. Please utilize social media as well as possible without ruining our real life.