The rise of.............. Social Media.

"poke", "poke poke", "poke poke poke". Sounds familiar? Meet the "poke" function on Facebook. (I have no idea what is it for other than to irritate people)




Social media, has been around since about 10 years ago? I presume that to be so. I only started with Friendster in Secondary school. Anyway, the rise of a super power, Social Media. So, what constitutes to its rise to power?




I would like to explain base on personal experience. So here goes.


People have needs, to be recognised. Friends, people to people relation. Hence, the birth of social media. Some smart guy decided, 'hey! Won't it be cool to connect with my friends online like in IRC or MSN? But since I don't have the time to talk to all of them, why don't I create a page and put them all in there and I can access them and ta duh! WE ARE CONNECTED!' Genius? I guess so. But along with its rise comes a problem of privacy.


People want people to know what they are doing, well, most of them, they want to be recognised. This, according to Maslow's hierachy of needs, is the social need of human beings. We want to be known, we want to be recognised, I bet even geeks who hide behind the computer needs a social life, be it online or in real life. Thus, social media like Facebook satisfies that. People write on your wall, saying 'hello, long time no see' and you feel good. So, the satisfaction of the social criteria. This is the main reason why it rose to such a great height.



Back to the problem on privacy, well, I myself experienced some privacy issue. I have a twitter account and for a period of time, I connected my twitter to my facebook page, thus the activity bar will show my tweets whenever I tweet. One day, somebody (not my friend but someone I know) saw my tweets and had a misunderstanding. The situation's unresolved even until today. I have since removed my twitter from my facebook.



If such a thing can happen to me, it got me thinking, what about my pictures? What about all the things I say online? It can be seen and it can cause me harm. Thus, my facebook is now a dead zone and I only use it to view other people's profiles and write to people or respond to their wall posts. Nothing else. No more pictures posted. Though my old ones are still there. I have been burnt pretty badly. So I know what social media can do once someone is not careful.



The rise of Social Media can be a double edged sword. My take is that we wield the sword carefully.