The Social Media Cultural Gap

To start with, I’m Chinese and never visited any countries outside Asia, not the US, nor UK, nor European countries. But I have great interest in living and know more about these places. I believe there are only a handful of people writing in Medium living near me, maybe none. I have a great passion in trying out different things on the Internet and in the wide world of technology. When I try out all the services and geeky stuff around me or in my city, I have a big feeling of being not belonging to either this place or the western places because I enjoy those things that people around me don’t (yet). Below are some examples.

Twitter is a very good platform to update yourself with information around you if you have limited amount of time. I love reading status updates and messages from various Youtubers or different news from technology sites and even inspiring and mind blowing facts and knowledge from a wide variety of people. Though friends, relatives and colleagues don’t even have an account on Twitter, it makes me feel the pity that people around me are not enjoying the potential enjoy they can get. Of course, everyone around has a Facebook account, but Facebook cannot be there for everything in your life. Twitter is there for a reason and I find it hard to persuade or invite people to join. That’s one thing that frustrates me.

Another example is Foursquare. In Foursquare, I hardly have 10 friends. I found Foursquare informative even with only that little user base in my city. I always intentionally pull out my phone and tell my friends that I am going to check-in through Foursquare, then they’ll of course ask what that is. I’ll try my best to tell them what Foursquare can do and is a great tool to share great places to dine and hangout with your friends. But due to the incredibly small user base in my city, they’ll just go with the less functional Facebook check-in. That kind of sucks.

With all different social platforms flooding our lives, is it full already. There’s already no other places to take in more sharing spaces? Or does this phenomenon depend on the culture of the place? Maybe people from some places can take care of more platforms while the others can only take care or one or two. I have an account on all social media platforms that I know of, though the only one that I interact and communicate with my friends is Facebook. It is really not healthy to the both users and the Internet.