In today’s world, we have a large intake of media everyday. Whether it’s a newspaper, television, or an ad on Hulu, you’re taking in some form of media designed to influence you. In the past, humans didn’t experience anything near the amount of media we intake today. Back then, people relied on radio and newspapers to give them the information they needed on just generic news and political standings. The first newspaper was printed in 1690 and the first radio broadcast aired in 1906, so the radio was a very exciting technological advancement for its time. As technology evolved over the years, we see televisions being used more and more frequently for spreading news around. Soon Movies and cinematic films became a big industry for media around the world and especially in Hollywood. More and more television shows and movies and news outlets were created and now everyone has a TV in their households. But what is the largest source of media in the modern world for us? Social Media. With the creation of these social media platforms had to come the invention and spread of computers and smartphones. One of the first social media’s created was Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook.

Facebook. One of the first major forms of social media that has spread from a few thousand to millions of users everyday. This website was created by Mark Zuckerberg when he was attending his sophomore year at Harvard University in 2004. The initial reason Zuckerberg created this platform was to get back at a girl he was dating because she dumped him. Jealously, Zuckerberg stayed up for hours setting up a website for people at his school to rate girls that attended. Very quickly word got around of this hilarious website where you could see all the girls that went to your school and rate them. This soon became a big problem, obviously, when the school heard about it. They let him keep the website up as long as it was for the benefit of the school, so Zuckerberg made Facebook. At first it was just Harvard, then it quickly spread to universities everywhere. Zuckerberg eventually got it spread to people all over the country, even those who didn’t attend a University. This soon evolved into a very commonly used social media that has influenced many other people to build and design other platforms like it. Today we have multiple social media apps and websites such as Twitter and Instagram, and others like them. Now with these platforms, contact and interaction with others on social media has become one of the biggest ways we communicate and spread information throughout the world. In the United States, many people nowadays share posts about their political beliefs and what they stand for. This has brought a lot of division in the country especially during these past four years. When I go onto Instagram or Facebook or Twitter my whole feed is filled to the brim with posts about human rights and problems we need to fix in the country, but it wasn’t always like that. A study taken in 2013 said that more people were willing to discuss a political issue in person than on Facebook. The study also showed that people were less willing to discuss political issues on Facebook because of the fear of being the minority. Nowadays the country is so divided that people hang flags and signs outside of their house displaying their beliefs and they certainly don’t mind arguing with people on Facebook about them.

 In 2007, the world shook when a new invention was brought to the market. The smartphone. The first iPhone was on the market in late June of 2007. This invention put newspapers, radios, computers, and televisions all into your pocket. With the technology evolving everyday and more and more people buying smartphones and joining social media, there was and still is some contradiction with the massive intake of these platforms and other media outlets. With everyone having a phone with everything they needed in their pocket to communicate with others, people stopped interacting with others in real life. Everywhere teens and adults were being sucked into their screens. Today, everyone around the world can stay connected and informed through their smartphones, but is it worth the price of losing real interaction with others. Teens everywhere are sucked into social media platforms and just sit in their room all day and don’t come out. In my personal experiences I have also been at many times sucked into my phone, especially recently with having to be in quarantine for the majority of 2020. Social media has also gotten into the White House and is being used within almost all government officials. President Donald Trump has been especially known for his outrageous tweets and making very big statements on his accounts throughout the social media platforms. But with all these news sources and ways of absorbing information, how much of it can we trust? There’s the classic saying of don’t trust everything you see on the internet, so how can we trust the content of the tweets the President sends out.  This dishonesty of the media being flooded into the world has many people only trusting limited sources. Even the president continuously talks about “fake news” and has led people to only watch certain news stations that only discuss people’s certain beliefs. This has also been a big impact in how the country is divided, peoples social media are full of one-sided discussions and posts, and this isn’t an accident. Social media create algorithms so only show you what you are interested in, and this goes for even ads too. 

Social media has been a widespread form of communication and has connected people from  all over the world, but is it helping the state of our country? Or is it one of the key factors that contributed to our mass division? Before it was integrated into the White House and other government functions, people didn’t feel comfortable sharing and speaking about what they believed in online. There were so many different kinds and alterations of beliefs that people feared being the minority. Nowadays the beliefs in this country have become so black and white and two-sided that families are ripped apart from debating. Social media has had such a huge impact on our country that I’m not very sure on how it will recover. Whenever I go on any social media I only see political posts or some sort of repost of news that I rarely see people posting and sharing pictures of themselves and their experiences. This sort of evolution of social media has changed life forever. Though these platforms have brought division within the country, I don’t see social media as a total negative. Now we are able to see horrific scenes of police brutality within our country and in others. We are able to spread more awareness for issues than we ever could have in the past. People are learning from their mistakes and taking responsibility for their actions. In the darkest of times, I see hope that people will soon come together and care for each other as we did so long ago. 

Works Cited

Douthat, R. (2016, May 21). Facebool’s Subtle Empire. The New York Times, pp. 1-4.

Hampton, K. N., Rainie, L., Lu, W., Dwyer, M., Shin, I., & Purcell, K. (2014, August 26). Social Media and the ‘Spiral of Slence’. Pew Research Center.