Has Social Media Changed Your Life?
Let’s admit it, being in the midst of the action in social media seems to be that BIG thing since sending sms has been introduced to us Filipinos. You know, we who boasts as THE texting capital of the world and upcoming Facebook superstar in terms of sheer number of accounts created, real accounts to the right and dummy accounts to the left are all counted here.
Anyway, Facebook is not the only social media platform we all use. Twitter is another form of social media which very well takes third place, where sms is still king for now and Facebook comes second, in terms of sending messages and group announcements. Other microblogging sites are catching up too.
Yes dearies, the young has invaded Twitter too and why not? Sending messages to friends via Twitter is FREE. Free in terms of not using data charge per message sent per subscriber. Imagine, if all your friends are in Twitter, you can just send a status update to your 10 friends that tomorrow you will be going to the mall after school. There’s really no need to shell out money ten times multiplied several times as the number of messages because you can reply several times as long as you want to.
I’m sure the telcos are squirming in their seats trying to think of ways on how their subscribers can part with their hard-earned money.
For me, there’s a dark side to engaging in these social media tools when it comes to communicating with friends, real or virtual.
Privacy gets lost, unless one has private accounts and know how to tinker with privacy settings, and everyone gets to read (and talk about) your tweets, your updates, your minute-to-minute narcissistic streak.
You get bullied because you said something they don’t quite agree with. Come on, you know this happens, right?
You get talked about, which is totally freaky to some like me, unless that’s what you like to happen. Whispers: bad publicity is still publicity, right? I don’t know. *shrugs shoulders*
You give people reason to get together and be friends because of what you said or wrote. They do, they tend to talk about you until they themselves have form friendships, thanks to your tweet and/or status update.
In Facebook, do you get tagged with products and services? Have you considered if it’s worth to buy morgan silver dollars or that cute pink dress? What did you do about it?
On the other hand, when disasters strike and we humans find something worthy to make (virtual) bonding renewed, we turn to social media to seek help for lost loved ones, get local updates, read shared personal experiences and be informed about the latest happening via shared information.
I won’t go into the topic about that violence which erupted elsewhere recently because Twitter had a big role in those unfortunate incidents.I just hope a tweet will inspire mankind to do better than inspire people to go up in arms against gv=governments and others.
