The Battle for Public Opinion
I remember social media being a place for people to connect with each other. I remember having a MySpace profile and being able to edit it any way that I wanted, adding music, pictures of my favorite bands, etc.. You could list your top six friends too, which was always a topic for discussion...positive or negative. I joined Facebook years ago, when you had to be a student at a four year university in order to be eligible to have a Facebook account. It was simple. You connected with classmates and friends from different universities, and posted pictures, statuses, and...you poked each other. You could share private messages too, but that was it. There were no memes, there were no public pages. Just passive aggressive hormonal and confused college students. Even then, the ability to get time away from bullying was almost completely over. Which by the way is one of the reasons bullying is taken so seriously now. I was bullied in grade school. But I got to go home and decompress from it all. Nowadays, kids don't get that, and it is so much harder on them.
Since the beginning of the ability to post a status at any time, people have used social media to win the hearts and minds of people. When someone writes a post about how much money they donated, or who they helped, that it is their birthday, etc., they tend to garner a little more attention from others and sometimes that is intentional.
The biggest difference between then and now, is that there also were no news pages. You still had to look up the news directly from the website, read a news paper, or catch the news on TV. It was not common to see an online feud on social media over opinions on world events.
Now the news is all over social media. Even if you don't go looking for it. As much as I appreciate having such easy access to what is going on in the world, there is definitely some resentment toward it. Now we immediately know almost every single bad thing that has happened in our neighborhoods, we know the second a decision is made public from by government. And we also know everyone's opinion on the matter. And there is always going to be someone that doesn't like someone else's opinion. There is absolutely no way to make every single person happy in any situation, at all, and now we hear about how everyone feels about it, and it has caused probably a bigger divide than I have ever seen. And those news outlets do decide what and how they report in order to gain the support of their followers. I am sure at some point, anyone that sees a post from the news come across their newsfeed, they have told themselves "Just don't read the comments." I tell myself that a lot. And I guarantee you that at some point, each of us have gone against our better judgement and delved into that insanity.
That's the positive and the negative. We have so much information at our fingertips, but that information has caused such a huge divide in society, and I'm not sure if that is something that can ever be truly fixed. Again, there will always be someone who is unhappy with what is presented on the news, no matter where it comes from.
Social media is definitely a powerful mobilization channel. It is so incredibly easy to make a post and have your thoughts and intentions heard. There are positives and negatives to this too. Positive benefits from this include the ability to get information about a missing child out to millions within minutes. A negative about social media is the spread of inaccurate information and the amount of people who are willing to believe it simply based on the side of that divide they are on. This is where we get into that tricky area of where freedom of speech crosses a line.
Social media has absolutely changed the world, but I'm not entirely sure it is for the positive. Further more, most of us are addicted to it whether we want to believe it or not. So this has become the new normal.
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