The Influence of Social Media

People are living in a modern world with numerous information and communication. The media such as TV, radio and newspaper is playing an important role in collecting and delivering information. Social media is a platform that offers individuals and organizations the opportunity to share information, news and views instantly and conveniently, such as Facebook, Twitter and Wechat. In recent years, the social media which focus on social communication is spreading and developing widely around the world. For example, the number of Facebook user is more than 1 billion and still increasing rapidly everyday. It is important to discuss the influence of social media on communication, because the majority of people are involved in this platform no matter in private life or business activities. Using examples of different social media which are quite popular in the world, this essay argues that social media brings efficiency and convenience to the society but decreases the privacy security and leads people’s focus too much on virtual world.

One of the greatest influences of the social media is on business especially on the way of connecting companies and consumers. Companies have their platform on social media such as Twitter, Facebook and Wechat which can cover more users instead of the homepage on the internet which probably cover less user. Further more, the social media platforms are not only a channel of issuing the basic information and news about the company, but also a new method of understanding customers’ needs by reading the feedback on the platform. This is much more effective than the traditional method of simply posting their products and services. For example, University of Birmingham uses the Twitter to display students’ campus activities and introduce the new research to draw attention of society, instead of only using the university homepage.

Another influence of social media is about people’s way of communication. In the past years, people connect each other by letter, telephone, fax and email. Nowadays, more people are using social media such as Facebook and Twitter which make people’s communication multidimensional by posting photos, videos. For example, more than 400 million photos are uploaded onto Facebook everyday which make people’s communication multidimensional instead of only by words and voice. Further more, compare to the traditional one-to-one communication style, the social media offer people the opportunity to share their life with many people at the same time by posting their ideas, experiences and photos onto Blog, Twitter and so on. In other words, people’s communication is more efficient and multidimensional now.

Social media brings many positive influence to the society, but it is like a double-edged sword which brings some negative influence especially to young people. According to a poll about teenagers use of the social website situation, “seventy percent of teens have their own cellphones, what’s more, twenty two percent of teens log on social media about ten times a day, and more than half of teens log on it more than once a day” (Gwenn&Kathleen, 2011). Children use smartphone not just to give calls but to use the social medias such as Blog and Facebook. With tens of thousands of people having access to social media and spending more time on it, it becomes an usual situation that some people play smartphone on the table and ignore those who they dine together In fact, face-to-face is a direct way to share sorrow and happiness when they talk with each other about work or study experiences and other topics. They take advantage of all of their free time to play on social media, which encloses themselves and shutdowns their emotion. That is actually diagnosed and identified as “socially detrimental human-technology relationship” (Chou et al, 2014).

It is noteworthy that followed by the increasing using of social media, there is a problem of private information security. people need to register personal information on social website, like the email address, ID number, telephone number and even the bank account number. These personal information could possibly bring troubles to the users or even be used by some illegal purpose. For example, Wechat, a social media company in China, has privacy settings that allow users protect information. However, when the users ignore to set it, the Wechat could collect their information and compile into the profile of their personal information and send related advertisements to their social websites. So people need to be careful protecting their private information when using the social media.

Social media makes people’s lives and work more efficient and convenient, it offers people the opportunity to share their lives and information at anytime and anyplace with internet. Nevertheless, social media has emerged some shortcomings that should be realized. It is necessary for people to adopt rational way to use it such as how much time to be spent on it and at which degree we should public the private information. The correct using of social media will make it more meaningful to society.