What is your perception of social media, do you think it is a fad or the biggest shift
since the Industrial Revolution?
Social media is most definitely a big shift. The ways in which we connect with each other and technology are always evolving, but social media is here to stay. In some form or another, we will continue to use technological tools to engage each other and ourselves with the world around us.
Before the advent of social media, I very rarely knew what was happening around me, even at a local level. I never actively watched the news or read the newspaper -- whatever I heard about, I heard from my family and close friends. Now, thanks to tools like Facebook and Twitter, news items are brought to my attention much more easily and much more frequently. Features such as infinite scrolling and hash-tags allow me to view the headlines, and pick and choose the content that I consume.
Tools like Wikipedia enable me to get a general idea of a concept, before doing some more thorough research from some more reputable, scholarly sources.
The ability for the general public to contribute results in an exponential amount of content being generated on Wikipedia.
We live in an age of constant information. Content is produced and published in never-before-seen quantities, which can become very overwhelming. Social media can actually save time (contrary to popular belief). Instead of spending hours scrolling through potentially meaningless content, a user can choose to view only what is important to them by using feedback-based filters. For example, on sites like Reddit, readers can "up-vote" their favourite stories. With enough up-votes, those stories will be displayed on a user's personalized front-page.
On a more professional level, sites like LinkedIn provide absolutely wonderful means of connecting with people of similar career goals, job searching tips, and even future employers. Many of these things would not be possible in a top-down media format.
I'm fairly confident that in the coming years, not only will social media tools change, but so will our definition of what social media really is. Nonetheless, we have arrived at a new paradigm from which there is no going backward.
