Social Media: Good or Bad for Society?

• by jakeaull

These days we’re seeing more and more about the use of social media. Is it that bad? What were the positives again?

For example – I’ve certainly read, like many people, about how Facebook causes insecurity by individuals seeing often only the positive highlights of other peoples’ lives & attempting to compare themselves to the fabricated portraits painted there. & there’s cyberbullying.

But social media has also been attributed as the medium delivering us from the unproductive TV addiction of the late 20th century – an addiction which has been compared to the unfortunate gin craze of 18th century England. Both represented unproductive, self-involved periods. Comparatively, social media is an explosion of creative production.

Social media is the birth of the “prosumer” where the world is no longer about producers vs. consumers or products vs. customers – we can all now be contributors. Through social media we tell companies what we want in products & the changes we want. For the first time we can all publish our own films, music, novels, photo-journals & artwork for the world to see.

So what is social media? YouTube, Facebook & it’s Instagram, Tumblr, Pinterest, Snapchat – all channels where everyday people create or share other everyday peoples’ creations. Social media has enabled citizens to overthrow bad governments (the Arab Spring). In the past, governments & corporations didn’t have to listen to “the man/woman on the street.” Now they have to. We have power we never did before & we have the ability to share our creativity with the world in ways we never did before. When this kind of power is made available to the common person, some say the “bar is lowered.” Which may be the case – there’s certainly a lot of lesser-quality creative seen in social media (because of quantity). But isn’t that worth the capabilities? And I suppose like many things, we can use this power to better ourselves and the world around us – or not.

Thanks for reading, Jake Aull, Zen Fires Digital Marketing