Social Media: Why It’s The Ultimate Platform For The Digital Age

Column Assignment

By Hilary Yeh

How many followers to you have on Instagram, Twitter? If you were born anytime from 1990 onwards, it’s almost a guarantee to say you grew up with the Internet. The web was your beacon of interest, a way of being able to live both in your head and online. One could have their own space to stand on their own, this being an absolute game changer for those who have otherwise felt underrepresented and unacknowledged in mainstream society. I, like many others my age, had many types of these cyber spaces in my high school days. Tumblr, BlogSpot, a YouTube channel- you name it, I had it. My mother’s generation, and other pre-millenial generations often acknowledge the web as a useful tool, but unnecessary in meeting the certain credentials of successful life: building a career, education..etc. I beg to differ.

Now that I find myself in the midst of my college years, evolvement of social media has become a mantra and a requirement just to actively be a part of modern day society.

In 2008, a teenage girl by the name of Tavi Gevinson started a fashion blog called Style Rookie on the blog host site Blogspot. Style Rookie’s posts ranged from everything from fashion, to pop culture, to specific teenage girl struggles. Gevinson garnered a loyal and large following early on, and after three years of blogging, the writer decided to move on to bigger things. Rookie Magazine, an independent online magazine launched in 2011 and has since been a huge web success. Their primary goal being to be a voice for a community otherwise underrepresented in the mainstream media pool: teenage girls, and female youth. The significance of this story does not come from what has been accomplished, but how. In a matter of three years, Gevinson was able to create a singular space in the world that was accurate to her experience, her thoughts, and individual opinion. Teenage girls around the globe suddenly had a presence in public thinking that was intelligent and important. Make no mistake; the big public following is no fluke. This twelve year old built an empire from scratch by just starting out with the simple form of a blog. By the time she hit her freshman year at NYU, Gevinson already had her own successful platform, became editor-in-chief of her own publication, stared in a Broadway play, and hosted her own TED Talk conference. All of these opportunities directly pointing back to the work that started it all: her blog. Undeniably likable, and seemingly attainable, Tavi’s story has become the mantra, and golden frame for explaining the social media generation. If a blog can take a teenage girl from Illinois suburbia and transport her to the cusp of the publishing, acting, and art worlds, the Venn diagram of self promotion, success, and accessibility becomes more attainable and less difficult to break into. Social media wins in the sense that it represents the best of what the internet initially had to offer when it was first introduced to the world: faster, better, stronger communication. It’s ability to break societal hierarchy and class elitism proves it’s worth as a asset to navigating the present day. The voice of a single individual wins again.