In the last twenty years, social media has come a very long way. From the days of Live journal, to MySpace, Facebook, Snap chat, Instagram and Twitter, social media quickly became a norm in our society. At first look, social media started out as an outlet for people to post their thoughts, likes and dislikes to an audience comprised of their friends and in some cases complete strangers making it a truly "social" experience that was fun new and refreshing.
As the years went on, this social platform began to evolve into the multi faceted machine you now see today. Facebook grew exponentially. Businesses began to realize how powerful of a tool this new form of media was.They then set out to develop marketing campaigns in order to truly maximize the potential reach to their audience and promote their products to consumers as they were sitting on their computers at home in their living room was something their predecessors never could deem possible and could have only dreamed of.
With this ability, the lack of privacy that we see in social media slowly began. A marketing strategy called data mining would collect and analyze the shopping habits of potential customer on social media, this was done via web browsing at first. Now, the intrusiveness has gotten to the point that your smartphone listens to you, and within a few hours, the product or place of business that was being talked about will show up in Facebook's timeline. Not only that, but social media has also become a powerful tool to employers who are seeking potential candidates for employment. From a realistical standpoint what is a better way to screen a potential employee to see what kind of a person he or she is by looking at his or her social media account? At the same time however, with this type of intrusive power comes great responsibility. Employers having the ability to screen potential employee's can not only see their like's and dislike's but there political views as well as sexual orientation and preference. It is paramount that potential employers maintain a certian type of objectivity while using this method of screening.
In addition, social media responsibility also falls on news sources to report in a truthful logical manner. If they don't, misinformation has the potential to spread like wildfire and skew fact from fiction, not only diluting the truth but also spreading out right lies as if they're fact as could be seen in the 2016 presidential election where it has been proven that Russian hackers used social media to spread fake news about Hillary Clinton, thus swaying public opinion in the favor of Donald Trump, all but handing him the election. As social media continues to grow, as well as manifest it will continue to play an instrumental part in the shaping of our society, however we as a society must be sure we control it, not let it control us, because with such a powerful tool comes great responsibility.
Comments
Post a Comment