The Importance Of Social Media

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In the year of 2016, we live in what is to be considered the “millennial” era. Those of us who were born and raised in the late 1990’s through the 2000’s have had the chance to experience a world like no other. This time period has accounted for a vast array of discoveries and advances in relation to technology, science, and human behavior. Each and every day, we find out something new about the societies that we live in and the world that surrounds us. These advances and discoveries that we have begun to make provide us with information that was not formally available to our parents, grandparents, and so on. Now a days, we use technology for pretty much any and every thing. It has taken on the responsibility of keeping us connected on a global …show more content…

Even so, when we think about one specific platform that does the best job at keeping connectivity within the human race, we must accredit it to the fairly new mass medium of social networks.
When someone mentions social media and networking, the first thought that our minds go to are platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Our minds immediately gravitate towards these specific sites because they happen to be in the top five most used social media webpages as of February of this year (Top Social Media Sites 1). These sites, in addition to others, have allowed us to become very closely connected to not just the world that we live in, but the people as well. The formal definition of social media, according to Merriam-Webster is, “forms of electronic communication through which users create online communities to share information, ideas, personal messages, and other content”. With that, however, the formal definition does not encompass all that goes into these online …show more content…

Because the true definition is more so based upon opinion rather than concrete fact, I wanted to see whether or not there would be a discrepancy in the definitions given by scholars as opposed to daily consumers. Within the market research that I conducted, one of the questions asked was, “If you had to explain what ‘Black Twitter’ was in one sentence, what would it be”? From that, I received an assortment of responses. Some people used phrases like “It’s lit” and “Sensational”, sayings that were coined by the Black Twitter community. These sayings simply expressed that Black Twitter was an exciting and fun place to be. Others said things such as “A collective of Black people relating to each other through news, jokes, similar life experiences, and different struggles in the Black community”. Among the 35 responses I obtained from my survey, most of them included key words such as “community”, “shared experiences”, and “black culture” in their personal definitions. With that, one could see that the general idea of Black Twitter is really just a space that brings people of similar stature together. The same can be said for any other social media site as well, however, Black Twitter tends to be unique in the way that it

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