Social Media and the Revolution it Brings

Social media are interactive Web 2.0 Internet-based applications. User-generated content—such as text posts or comments, digital photos or videos, and data generated through all online interactions—is the lifeblood of social media. Social media brings revolution in society. It brings awareness among people, easy access to information, source of entertainment and many more. In past, where we only use mobile phones for making calls or for sending SMS. Now we have a lot of social media apps that are serving the same purpose with a lot of other things. Now we can not only hear voices but we can also see our beloved ones through video calling. For this purpose, we have many social media apps like WhatsApp, Snapchat, Messenger, IMO, Skype and many more. We now need no balance for this but a good internet connection. For this we have WIFI and Data (4G/5G) services.

What actually social media is offering?

Social media has a lot of things to offer. It gives hundreds of reasons for us to get ourselves entertain. On social media we can interact with people living far off places. We can share pictures and videos to our beloved ones living in another countries and cities. There are content makers on these apps. Those who are working to give us different sort of entertaining content. We have apps like TikTok, Likee where people are posting videos of there talent and are giving messages to people by making short videos. Social media has a lot more to offer.

Positive Aspects of Social Media:

Like everything has its pros and cons. There is positive as well as negative aspects of social media. Talking about its positive aspects. There were times when we had to wait for main stream media to provide us information, any breaking news or happenings going around us. But now there are no boundaries. Social media give every single person an equal opportunity to start their Individual Journalism. Many young boys and girls are starting their channels where they are providing different type of news to us on daily basis. If any incident or accident happens, in no time we have pictures, videos and blog related to that event available on social media. We have influencers who are promoting small businesses. Now social media is not only use for entertainment purpose but it becomes a marketplace. Where we have online shops in hundred of numbers. We can order and get thing while sitting on our coach. It has a lot of positive aspects.

Negative Aspects of Social Media:

Like positive aspects it has negative aspects as well. As social media is accessible to everyone and anyone can share anything on it without any restriction. This can include some adult videos, unethical pictures, and Islamophobic content. It is also destroying our culture somehow as it is promoting foreign culture in our society. Influencers are also promoting western culture. It makes people insecure about their skin color, body type and skin texture. Young girls think that the pictures of models and influencers they are seeing on social media is reality. And they start to feel insecure about their natural skin. They start using beauty creams and it will cause their skin to get damage. At the same time, it also causing young boys to think that they deserve to have girls like them. They start idealizing famous personalities and want to marry girls with such perfect body, skin and lifestyle. Social media is also promoting elite culture. It looks like everyone in this country is rich. But we all know that 70% of our population is living beyond poverty line.

 

Where social media is making everything easy or accessible to people, it is also promoting foreign culture and making people insecure in many aspects as well. We need to understand how to use it productively. We need to make sure that we are the one who are using it and not the social media who is using us. Everything has its pros and cons; we are the sensible ones who learn how to practice to for our benefit.

By: Esha Shamim (01)