Social Media Impact On Modern Society

We were once a generation of hard working people who would listen to radio broadcasts or go to the local movie theater in our spare time; today it is rare to have a conversation without one of the participants checking his or her smart phone. Before social media, before iPods, before cable television, life was more separated. This is not to say that media did not exist in the early 1900s, but it obviously did not have the impact that it does on modern society. Everything was in hard copy back then – records turned into cassettes, which turned into compact disks, news was delivered over the radio or through the newspaper. Today, the popular way to listen to music is through MP3 – it is not a hard copy and has to be listened to through an MP3 player. Music lovers would go to concerts, not YouTube, to listen to music. People would go …show more content…
322). It is the way we use modern media in which each media or technological platform combines to benefit one another. Once upon a time, phones were used for phone calls, television was the only place you could watch shows, and social media meant going out and talking to other people; today, smartphones do just about anything the user needs it to do, someone can watch a television show online thanks to websites like Netflix or Hulu, and human interaction relies heavily on Twitter, Facebook, and other social media platforms. It was believed in 1978 that new technology would merge with traditional ways of interacting to create a new form of communication (Negroponte); that is exactly what happened and will continue to happen as time progresses and new technological advancements are made. Convergence is the new and old, traditional and modern coming together to create a new way of communicating. In other words, “convergence is…an old concept taking on new meanings” (Jenkins, 2006, p.