Social Media

I recently got into an argument with an older coworker of mine. He was lambasting social media and how it was ruining society especially the younger generation. While he had some good points which I fully agreed with, I feel that social media has some merits too that are often overlooked or not appreciated.

Without debate, Facebook is the biggest social media platform on Earth. Completely eclipsing MySpace back in the mid 2000's, Facebook is now used around the entire Earth. I was not one of the first users, but I joined back in 2005 when it was exclusive for college students which allowed me to see the evolution of the platform. It's funny looking back now at what Facebook has become. Facebook started as simply a collection of profile pages with a very simple design (ultimately made it better than MySpace which ended up being a vomit of HTML). When Facebook implemented the news feed feature, my friends were quick to denounce it as a violation of privacy. When Facebook expanded to everyone with an email address, my friends thought that Facebook was over. Ironically, these features ultimately made Facebook what it is today. Only a handful of my friends actually left Facebook due to these changes, and only one of those friends do I actually stay in touch with today.

Is Facebook a violation of our privacy? Only if you allow it to. Facebook has ruined people's lives and privacy is a thing of the past, but maybe this loss of privacy is only making people be a little more responsible online. The reality is that while people now have to be more careful what they post on Facebook, it's still the best way to share photos and ideas with friends when they are far away. Being in the Army, Facebook is by far the best way for me to stay in touch with friends and family back home. When Facebook becomes a replacement for actual social contact instead of enhancing long distance contact, then I can see it being a problem.

Admittedly, I only got into Twitter because of a college programming project. I wrote my own Twitter application in Python. In order to test it, I had to create my own twitter profile. This is why my handle is @purduewilly. Definitely not my first choice, but I didn't really care at the time. Regardless, my Twitter application doesn't work anymore. I probably just need to update the code with the new API, but there's no point since I am a huge fan of the Twitter iPhone app. Once I got the iPhone app and tinkered around with who I followed, Twitter became my primary source of news.

If you use Twitter correctly and not follow a bunch of celebrities and other non-interesting people, Twitter can be very useful. You can use hashtags (#) to follow a trending conversation. You can follow news outlets and get breaking stories typically much faster than when they post it on their respective sites. I only follow one news commentator at the time, Joe Scarborough of Morning Joe, and since he's limited to 140 characters, he is forced to by pithy which I think forces people to cut BS. Like with Facebook, I don't see any merit to tweet your friends, but using it to keep in touch with the larger world is great. I typically only tweet movie reviews or whenever I'm engaging in a trending topic. Occasionally I'll share news articles through Twitter because I've been able to link my Twitter with my Facebook which only enhances the platform in my opinion.

The last social media platform I'll discuss is Reddit. Unlike the latter two, I feel Reddit is still mostly anonymous. I joined the site after Digg.com changed its interface and became very unusable for me. Like Facebook, Reddit had a very slim and simple interface which made the switch very easy. Reddit and Digg are basically a collection of popular links. Their popularity is dependent upon users upvoting and downvoting. What really made them social media platforms were the forums. You can click on a link and then make a comment about the link. Unfortunately, a lot of people will comment on a link based solely on the headline without reading the contents, but it still provides a valuable function sometimes even providing more information than the link itself.

One key aspect to Reddit that Digg never had are the subreddits. Digg did divide links based on category, but the subreddits take that concept to a greater extreme. Links are not just separated by broad categories but are separated by very specific categories. If I want to look for Breaking Bad links, instead of going to an entertainment section, I can go to the Breaking Bad subreddit. There are subreddits for even the most obscure of topics. If by some small chance it doesn't exist, then you can make one. This feature actually creates a community of sorts and makes this platform just as enjoyable as the other two.