Social Media Expert Group

The expert group that presented in class taught us about social media. Social media is a concepts that we seem to know a lot about now because we are the product of a generation that practically lives online. However there were somethings that were mentioned that I didn’t know. For one they mentioned how the first social media site was actually launched in 1997. This was only later followed by Myspace, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. This actually surprised me because I genuinely thought that Myspace was one of the first public social media sites available.

One thing that this group discussed was how social media has become so successful in the past ten years. There are multiple factors that attribute to the success of a social site but the main factor seems to be human self-obsession. Social sites feed upon you uploading information about yourself. This includes all forms of you everyday information to major milestones in your life. In a normal day you could post a status about your mood, then upload a picture of what you had for lunch that day, and finally post Snapchat pictures of your night out. This is all very “you” centric. What we have noticed as a whole is that people seem to now need some kind of validation from their social media lives. I know of an Australia model who was an “Instagram star” and she recently just one night just deleted all her social media overnight. She went on to explain how she felt horrible about how she was kind of living her life completely online. She would spend hours out of her day to post well enough to get a “post-able” picture. She also explained how she was once paid $400 dollars just to post a picture of herself in a certain dress. But this lead her to be overly conscious of her body images and she was doing unhealthy things to keep looking a certain way. It seems that kids more and more validate their self-worth based on how many likes they got on a comment or picture. If there were more likes, it was a great day. If there were less likes it was a horrible day.

However this is not to say the social media is all bad. This form of social communication gives us all a sense of community. We are all connected to each other now. We just need to make sure to not let a number of likes determine our happiness.