I got this subject as a writing assignment for a "job application" that petered out so quickly that I now think this was just a client requirement that they got written from me free of cost.
Nevertheless, it is written with as much dedication as any other piece I would have written on my own. I might even expand this piece later.
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Impact of Social Media on Society in the Last Decade
The world of social media as we know it came into being in the early 2000s, with MySpace and Orkut being among the early movers. Although the history of social media as a concept can be traced back to the earliest online message boards in the late 1970s, these prototypes would be unrecognizable to the average Facebook or Instagram user today, and would be considered redundant relics of a bygone era, which, in a very real sense, they are.
By 2010, social media had really come into its own, with the launch of Facebook in 2004, YouTube and Reddit in 2005, Twitter in 2006, Tumblr in 2007, and Instagram in 2010 upending the first movers in the field and establishing a dynamic force that has had a mixed but defining impact on society in the years since.
The impact of social media on society in the last decade can be readily broken down into six aspects:
o Personal Connections
o Commercial Opportunities
o Easy Audience Access for Creatives
o Legal Impact
o Unethical Content
o Political Polarization
1. Personal Connections
The most obvious impact of social media has been the ease with which people from across the globe can now connect and converse. From finding and connecting with lost friends from high school, to arguing with complete strangers about sports, movies, music, and culture in general, to helping out in natural disasters and other emergency situations, to finding potential romantic partners, social media quite literally presents the world at the user’s fingertips. With many personal connections being disrupted due to the need to travel for professional or educational pursuits, people can now effectively stay in touch with the multifaceted connectivity offered by social media. Online interactions can also lead to new connections and friendships for people who may be starved for a sense of community in the real world but find comfort in the embrace of friendly strangers on the internet.
Many government organizations around the world are also effectively making use of social media to establish direct contact with their citizens, enabling crisis resolution in real time. Of course, private corporations have also got in on the act, establishing a hitherto unimaginable direct connectivity with individual end consumers through social media such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or YouTube.
2. Commercial Opportunities
This directly feeds into the second aspect of how social media has impacted society over the last decade, with direct contact with end consumers opening up extremely lucrative marketing opportunities for manufacturers and retailers. The social media boom has truly opened up the field of B2C marketing, freeing it from the necessity of physical connections in the form of telephonic conversations, dealership visits, or house to house salesmanship. With no need for a physical connection, sellers can now stay in touch with buyers anytime, anywhere, allowing companies to interact with customers in real time.
The extensive, multifaceted user data generated on social media platforms means that advertisers can obtain extremely precise data points about their consumers, including their likes and dislikes, behaviors and lifestyles, frequency and timing of internet usage, social connections, and more. This can, when used intelligently, be used to create personalized advertising that generates more leads than any other marketing strategy. The heavy use of social media by end users reinforces the potential of this marketing strategy, with almost all consumer demographics maintaining a notable presence on social media platforms these days.
3. Easy Audience Access for Creatives
Social media platforms present a readily accessible audience for creatives of every description.
Platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube are accessible globally, allowing creators from every part of the world to share their craft to a global audience. Whether they succeed in generating a livelihood from these pursuits depends on their popularity, but it presents a promising landscape for creators who may not have access to traditional means of reaching an audience.
YouTubers like MrBeast and PewDiePie have become global phenomena over the last decade using pretty much nothing but a video camera, a sound setup, and some video editing software. Comedians, talk show hosts, and podcasters can garner immense popularity and hype from promotion on social media, without having to rely on corrupt industry insiders, promoters, or agents. Budding musicians can use social media to gain an adoring audience even before holding a single live show, while practitioners of often-ignored arts and crafts such as origami, mime, or stage magic can form global communities joined by nothing more than a shared love of that particular activity.
4. Legal Impact
While direct access to consumers on social media has been profitable for commercial organizations, the sheer scale of user data generation and lack of concrete assurance about its security and ethical usage have raised eyebrows. Many government bodies have taken social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter to court, aiming to bolster data protection for its own citizens against malicious third parties who may purchase or hack into the user data storage of social media platforms and use this data for a whole host of illegal, unethical, and unwholesome applications, ranging from identity theft to blackmail to cyber-attacks on government apparatus.
On the other hand, several governments have gotten into legal battles with social media platforms over the claimed right of government bodies to legally acquire user data from social media platforms in the name of national security, even against the wishes of the individual users. The confidentiality of user data, including critical information such as the user’s real-world identity, is a key selling point for most social media platforms, and such actions have raised concerns about the possibility of totalitarian behavior from governments, who could abuse user data from social media platforms to harass or even arrest dissidents, suppressing free speech.
The need to protect individuals’ free speech while simultaneously protecting national and international security remains a key concern for the world of social media, with universal, sustainable, feasible solutions yet to be found.
5. Unethical Content
The democratization of interpersonal connectivity brought about by social media has been a double-edged sword, with the utter lack of discrimination in bringing people closer sometimes leading to deeply unhealthy associations. Terrorist organizations frequently use the data encryption and protection features offered by social media platforms to recruit new members and plan and organize their activities. Pedophiles and other types of sexual predators have been able to get close to young or even underage social media users of both genders, while sales of illegal substances are also frequently carried out over encrypted social media platforms due to the anonymity they offer. Such trends pose a serious threat to societal stability and even national security.
Other than such flagrant violations of the law or societal ethics, more insidious evils have also sprung up due to the overuse of social media, particularly by vulnerable populations such as children, teenagers, and young women. Filters and other image editing tools allow influencers to post unrealistically attractive or fake photos and videos on their highly popular social media channels, which can influence young, impressionable users into making permanent changes to their body or trying unhealthy diets that lead to long-term damage, including bulimia and other eating disorders. Dysmorphia, eating disorders, and psychological conditions have been on a constant rise over the last decade, fueled at least in part by the easy access to the unethical content shared by social media influencers.
In addition, social media can be highly addictive due to their use of the ‘infinite scroll’ technology. This can lead to unproductive lifestyles and unchecked time wastage, particularly among younger users. User anonymity on social media is also conducive to fraudulent activity such as financial scams or honey traps leading to blackmail, with the rising volume of “online scams” presenting a novel quandary for law enforcement agencies all over the world.
6. Political Polarization
Rampant political polarization may be the most far-reaching, notorious, insidious, and unwholesome impact of social media on national and global society over the last decade.
To make themselves irresistible to the broadest possible range of users, most social media platforms utilize algorithms to present viewers with new content that is similar to or related to content they have previously watched. This allows the social media platform to diversify its user base while simultaneously ensuring recurring activity from all of its users.
This, allied to the excessive usage of social media platforms by users, has led to rampant escalation of the “echo chamber” phenomenon across the world, with collective agreement on every talking point becoming more valuable for voters than the civic duty to disagree respectfully and to have an open debate taking in all perspectives.
This has led to rising polarization among the voting masses in democracies around the world, with free access to global knowledge and diverse perspectives leading not to more homogeneity and social stability but instead to an escalation in heterogeneity and discord. Since social media users are only exposed to their own echo chamber, they get increasingly entrenched in their own worldview and become less likely to even acknowledge the other side’s views, let alone being open to accepting them as the truth.
The ability to change one’s mind, which is absolutely essential in civil discourse, has become a lost art. Even within their echo chambers, people who simply change their opinions after some thought are often shamed as “traitors to the cause” by their in-group, which leads to silent suppression, with people censoring themselves rather than having to face the wrath of the mob. While this may be beneficial for individual political parties in the short term, it has turned into a severe threat to national unity all over the world.
Social media, once hailed as the great liberator of the individual over the group, seems to be stuck in a rut of furthering groupthink rather than allowing individuals to think for themselves and express their own opinions without being affiliated to any particular group or ideology. Social media, once hailed as an essential aid in individual citizens being able to freely discuss political ideas, is now stuck in a legal battleground over its role in enabling free speech. Social media, once hailed as the great global online melting pot, now has to make sure that the stew it is serving up is healthy and wholesome rather than corrosive and poisonous.
Like it or not, social media platforms are very much here to stay. They are deeply ingrained into the societal fabric and have become essential to the daily lives of millions of end users all over the world. Solutions – which may range from voluntary moderation to legal restrictions and everything in between – need to be found to the dark side of social media, so that their bright side can keep regaling us for a long time to come.
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