True Purpose

Social media are technology-based platforms designed to create and facilitate the sharing of ideas, career interests, messages, and pictures and videos, in an online community. Well, it was. In my view, the most popular social media apps and websites are those sharing pictures and videos, which really represents Postman’s discussion of our pictographic rather than typographic minds. The most popular social media are Instagram, Twitter, and Snapchat for young users. There, users share to their friends and followers information about their own lives. And that is pretty much social media’s new purpose: a platform used for bragging.

   Everywhere on people’s stories, tweets, posts, you see pictures of what good food they are eating, their “scholar” pictures of them doing their homework, their luxurious vacations. The sharing of ideas is rarely seen. That can be seen with Pinterest, but it's growth is slow in comparison to the social media giants of Instagram and Snapchat. The sharing of career interests is for LinkedIn which obviously doesn't resonate well with the young community. Most significant, the sharing of messages used to be powerful in Facebook and MySpace, social media platforms known for their social networking. But as iMessage, IMS, and text messages became more dominant, Facebook was abandoned by the youth and MySpace became all but obsolete.

   In all of this you see the popularity of Instagram and Snapchat, instant ability to broadcast pictures and videos of one’s life and abilities to their social network. Twitter’s popularity? Posting or tweeting about how one is feeling or activities for the day. But you all see the transition of social media. No longer is it used to connect, it's used to isolate. It is used to boast about one’s life to others, rather than share it.

    What do you believe is social media’s new purpose? Is social media still used to share ideas and information outside pictures and videos? Does this represent Postman’s discussion of our tendency to look for pictures rather than read?

--- Hamilton Nguyen