The “Social” in Social Media
Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Twitter are all social media apps that are meant to bring people together with similar interests from different backgrounds. But exactly are they for.
To start with Social Media is that it is in fact an app that does bring people together. This is the reason why people stay. They stay because of the fact that social media is meant to bring people together. It makes it easier to talk to those with the same interests or even argue with those who have different opinions. That’s not even to begin with what else social media has done to make people stay. People begin to stay because they can easily keep in touch and update those who they do not get to see for long periods of time. They can create events and groups around similar interests and ideas. An example of this is the River Rat’s Rugby group that we have on Facebook. We are all part of the rugby team on campus and share that in common. We use this to post workouts, practice time, and even memes all centered around rugby.
However, for what social media has that makes people stay it also replaces something. That something is human connection. As humans, we are social creatures that need to interact with each other. Social media has never made it easier to be social because we can interact with anyone online, update our entire group of friends, and make new friends from these social media apps. But with this, actual interactions take a back seat. People do not meet with those “long, lost” friends that we don’t get to see that often because we can always keep in touch with them. Then there is the group aspect,(and even I fall into this). In these groups, we often take advantage of them and don’t actually meet these people. There used to be “fan clubs” and “gatherings” that allowed these people to get together and finally meet each other.
This is definitely related to motivation because it is a human need and not what social media apps intended to do. People decided that with social media apps it made connections easier and that is why they began to pull away from actually getting out there to meet other people. Social media is now the newest way to keep in touch with friends and even sometimes the actual reason you have those friends. So when those who don’t have the social media to be connected then they aren’t technically friends at that point. This is the way that people work now and replaced the idea of a connection in real life with the connection across the web.
