The power of social media is very strong in today’s world. Imagine how many people are on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc. There are more than one billion Facebook and over 900 million Twitter users around the world, so the power of how fast things can spread is unreal.
For instance, celebrity news is one of the fastest spreading news through social media. The marriages, the newborns, or even what the Kardashian’s had for lunch is some of the biggest "news" we look at. Through the hashtags and the curiously timed pictures taken by the thirsty papparazi, we can find news on almost any famous person. Take Lamar Odom’s hospitalization as an example. The news about Lamar spread like wildfire and was open to the public within a few hours, and now all you have to type in a search engine his name and many different articles will show up about him and his condition.
Odyssey is also a great way to share and spread thoughts and ideas around for the world to see. It has completely amazed me how this website and sharing articles can spread to where even people you don’t know look at your stories. People have so many different opinions that they want the world to see and talk about, and I think that the Odyssey is a great place to form those opinions.
Advertisements are another huge part of social media. When you scroll through Facebook, have you ever noticed that the advertisements are from websites that you have most recently looked at? I think that is amazing that social media has the power and the ability to know your search history and then make advertisements out of it.
To me, Twitter and Facebook are one and the same. They both are forms of picture taking, typing thoughts, and ways to spread news. It amazes me how far we have come in this generation to build up social media and make it as powerful as it is today. Imagining what it was like for my parents when they were in college is so hard. They didn’t have the technology or the social media like we do. When their professors needed to give them homework assignments, they didn’t have Blackboard. When my parents met, my mom didn’t have Facebook to help her look up my dad and find everything about him just by looking at his page. They had to actually go out and talk to each other to find things out about each other. Not saying that that is a bad thing now, but through social media we can look up some things about one another that could potentially be a deal breaker for you, and you wouldn’t have to waste your time by going out with them.
Social media is such a powerful form of technology, and without it, I don’t know where I would be. It is such a great platform for news, ideas, and just a great form of communication in so many ways. I think sometimes people underestimate how easily something can be brought up through the sharing of your ideas on social media. Give it a shot! You never know how quickly your ideas can be spread and maybe make a difference in someone’s mind.
