“I’m going to tweet that!” “I saw your snap story. It was hilarious!” “Did you see the Facebook posts on her trip to Cancun?” “I can’t believe that YouTube video went viral.”
There is a human need to share and monitor all that is around us. We take joy and pleasure in knowing what is happening in lives of others. We compare and contrast their lives to ours, the good and the bad, the beautiful and the ugly. Sharing anything and everything has become a huge part of our culture, and due to social media, the way the world shares and consumes aspects of life is accelerating and always changing.
Different social media are used depending on the type of information shared. Would you post a picture from a crazy night out with your friends on LinkedIn? If your answer is yes then you are a very brave soul, but the majority would not. Why is this? How is LinkedIn any different from Facebook or Twitter any different from Tumblr? All sites allow someone to write status updates, share pictures, post videos and chat with others online. Similarly, everyone dresses differently depending on the social setting. You would not wear sweatpants and a t-shirt to a charity ball, the same way you would not wear a suit and tie to a pool party. As long as you are wearing clothes, does the social setting matter? Yes, the social setting and the clothing you choose to wear go hand in hand. You adapt to your surroundings to represent the best mold of yourself that fits the particular social setting. The same ideology applies to the way you present yourself on social media.
Another key player in the way we share our lives online is our target audience. In recent years, more parents and grandparents have joined Facebook. The change in the social setting has led to a change in the way the younger generations share their lives on that platform. Social apps like Instagram and Snapchat owe some their popularity to this change. But who decides how each social media outlet is used-- the creators, the users or both? LinkedIn was founded with the purpose of professional networking. The same does not apply to Snapchat. This application was created for the use of sharing quick pictures and video messaging lasting 10 seconds or less. Because of the temporary nature of the messages, the app was used to send sexual content from one user to another. In the early stages, Snapchat was known as the “sexting” app. In 2015, Snapchat introduced the ‘My Story’ feature to the app and took control of how the application should be used-- to share parts of everyday life in quick fleeting moments.
The way we interact with one another is always changing and this is reflected in social media. The provision of a social media outlet is by the creator, the users have the real power on how it should be used. For example, Twitter is used for social activism. People decided to put down their pitchforks and pick up their phones.
