The Evolution of Social Media

• The Evolution of “Social Media” over the 19^th, 20^th, and 21^st centuries
• My call to change of how social media has taken over many of our lives can find its root from as early as the 19^th century.
•  The invention of the steam press in the early 19th century, and the emergence of mass-market newspapers such as the New York Sun marked a profound shift. The new technologies of mass dissemination could reach large numbers of people with unprecedented speed and efficiency, but put control of the flow of information into the hands of a select few. For the first time, vertical distribution of news, from a specialist elite to a general audience, had a decisive advantage over horizontal distribution among citizens.
• This trend accelerated with the advent of radio and television in the 20th century. New businesses grew up around these mass-media technologies. In modern media organizations, news is gathered by specialists and disseminated to a mass audience along with advertising, which helps to pay for the whole operation.
• In the 21^st century, the internet has disrupted this model and enabled the social aspect of media to reassert itself. In many ways news is going back to its pre-industrial form, but supercharged by the internet. Smartphones and social media such as blogs, Facebook and Twitter may seem entirely new, but they echo the ways in which people used to collect, share and exchange information in the past.
• Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist said, “Social media is nothing new, it's just more widespread now.” He likens John Locke, Thomas Paine and Benjamin Franklin to modern bloggers.
• This leads me to conclude that social media has technically been around for a long time. We don’t understand how we lived before smartphones, but we did. We can coexist with social media, but my call to change is to get us to not let it overtake us. It is still growing, and pretty soon we will have to check 10 things before we can do anything. If anything, my call to change will help keep us socially aware of our surroundings, and how we must wisely use social media to better this World, and not just for the betterment of ourselves.