Social Media is, at its most basic sense, a shift in how people discover, read, and share news and information and content. It’s a fusion transforming monologue (one to many) into dialog (many to many.)
It can be categorized in to six types and they are: Joint projects like Wikipedia, blogs like Twitter, content communities like YouTube, social networking sites like Face book, effective game worlds like World of War craft and virtual social worlds like second life. Other than this social media technologies may include: blogs, picture-sharing, vlogs, wall-postings, email, instant messaging, music-sharing, crowd sourcing and voice over IP and many more.
For example users of LinkedIn mainly focus on identity, reputation and contacts whereas YouTube building blocks are sharing, conversation, groups and reputation.
Impact of social media
Positive impacts:
•Friends: Making friends has become easier with these social networking sites like Facebook, Google+ and twitter etc. while old days it was a bit tough to make friends unless and until one has personal interest of going out and making friends. Now a day’s we can have a video chat which is available for free of cost.
• Empathy: By connecting with friends through social networking sites we share all of our good and bad experiences with friends. This will improve the relationship between friends and thus creating good bonding.
•Communication: Everybody is becoming so busy with their lives that they don’t even have time to communicate with their family members. Our time is getting thinner and thinner with busy work schedule and family commitments. Social networking sites give us a chance to communicate in a speedy and effective manner.
Negative impacts:
Otherwise social media is leaving a negative impact rather being positive. Most of the youth spend lot of time on the internet to visit and check their single or multiple accounts. This will affect students, youth and productivity of work because of the extreme use of technology.
• Cyber bullying: Usage of social media may create a chance for emotional distress in getting frightening, irritating and degrading communication from another teenager which is called cyber bullying. It’s been proved that cyber bullying will build advanced levels of depression and anxiety for victims and also resulted in youth suicide. Most of the females become victims of this cyber bulling.
• Texting: Texting is used to disturb people. Using cell phones and social networking sites for instant messaging to threaten, and Spat relationship partners are increasing day by day. One in three teens in relationships has been text messaged up to 30times an hour by a partner to know where they are, what they are doing, or who they are with.
• Privacy: Most of the teenagers are not aware of the website policies when setting their profiles and they may not be even aware of disclosing the information to the third parties like the advertisers. Most of the teenagers like to post their information publicly which will affect them when the hackers or people with cruel intension may use their information for wrong purposes.
