The Revolutionary Social Media

The first social media article I wrote was almost a year ago and so I thought it was about time I re-encountered this hot trending topic. 

Social media is currently one of the most used, talked about, underrated and misunderstood 'things' of the 21st century. I just know that somewhere out there people are busting their brains undertaking some serious studies about the social, political and economic impact of social media. I am no expert but I just have to join in on the social media bandwagon by sharing my top 5 observations about the revolutionary Social Media!  

1. Legitimizes Stalking Before social media, 'stalking' was one of those taboo words and certainly no normal person would want to be caught stalking or be referred to as a stalker or worse admit to stalking! These days people have no qualms about it. It's just what we (sorry, they) do! Send someone a friend request, wait for them to accept, once they accept don't even say 'Hey, how're u doing? Thanks for the add'...psssh. Just get straight to work browsing though their pictures and scrolling down their walls. Nowadays it may even be recommended as affirmative action. For example, it's called 'Networking' on LinkedIn and 'Sliding In the DMs' everywhere else that a messenger exists.  Many a millennial couple has been formed this way. The worrisome type is the one that just blends in with no indication of their purpose for joining your network. They may like something everybody likes or worse say nothing like silent observers. 

2. Makes Everyone a News Reporter Who needs to watch local news, the radio or *gasp* read the local paper when we are all employed to various social media networks as news anchors, field reporters, weather forecasters, sports commentators extraordinaire? Seriously, we know we are doing or jobs well when the local news now looks to our tweets, status', walls and likes for news headlines. Social Media has really but a true spin on social justice.

3. Could Make You an Expert If you really calculate the time spent reading particular tweets, statuses and wall posts by particular people on specific topics it would be the equivalent of a liberal arts course/degree. Depending on which friend's page you visit most frequently, at the end of the year you could walk away being an expert in music, cuisine, wealth management, politics, it all depends really.  

4. Puts Ideas in Your Head From the ads, suggestions of pages and people to follow and even to the content shared by our friends/followers; your opinion on various issues can be swayed by social media if you are not consciously aware and even if you are. As the saying goes, you are the sum total of the people you spend the most time with and if that happens to be through social media then buyer beware. Be sure that you are being influenced by people you actually want to be influenced by through your social networks.

5. Invented Hash Tag Abuse Ok. I really wanted to have my five serious special observations to share, but I don't know what more I could say except... 'Anybody knows what happened to Google Wave?' #justasking #theyjustupanddisappeared #beenaskingforalongtimenow #seriously :D