INTRODUCTION
As we go deeper into a world where social media dominates some of people’s lives, you find yourself asking ―How much time do we really use social media?‖ An article online published by Andrea Chang entitled ―Digital-media use to average 15.5 hours a day by 2015, study predicts‖ reports that the USC shows that Americans consume "an enormous amount" of media via television, radio, phone and computer, amounting to an average of 63 gigabytes per person per day last year. All told, total U.S. media consumption reached 1.46 trillion hours in 2012, an average of 13.6 hours per person per day, a year-over-year increase of 5%. It is more than half of your daily life. Socializing is important to people as the saying says ―no man is an island‖. Socializing with other can help us release tension by talking out our problems. It reduces stress, enhance your sense of well-being and happiness, and even lengthen your lifespan as Eric Leins’ article said. The introduction of digital conversations helped people to communicate those who are remote to us. Now, love ones are just a chat away. Why did we chose this kind of topic to deal with? An innovation in the world of communication had given birth to social media dating back from 1969 when CompuServe was the first commercial Internet service provider for the public in the United States. Since then, communication is taking a new path to the future. Years past and the technologies pushed boundaries and create more communication tools for us to use. Now, we are using these technologies more often than what we should. And even takes place a half of our daily lives. We want to know the effects of using such technologies for I believe that like any other inventions out there, some may have a downside if misused and we want to know what it is for us to cope and handle this amazing technology properly. Teenagers uses social media about 7 ½ hours a day consuming media — watching TV, listening to music, surfing the Web, social networking, and playing video games, according to a 2010 study of 8- to 18-year-olds conducted by the Kaiser Family Foundation. Our aim here is to know the common effects of using social media especially to teens. Teenagers nowadays are becoming more socially active compared to past couple of years which is why the ―Facebook Generation‖ had been tagged to today’s generation.
As one of the user that uses this technology, experiencing it gives thoughts about using it and I found out that it is giving me more than what I know about it. Learning its effects may help us get through the complications that it may be giving to us unconsciously. Finding out the good effects and bad effects and taking appropriate actions to it is the goal of this study and hopefully we can benefit for the information that we may discover in the unveiling the effects of social media to teenagers.
A. DEFINITION OF SOCIAL MEDIA Social media by Merriam-Webster’s definition, are forms of electronic communication (as Web sites for social networking and microblogging) through which users create online communities to share information, ideas, personal messages, and other content (as videos). Social media is a way to transmit, or share information with a broad audience. Everyone has the opportunity to create and distribute. All you really need is an internet connection and you’re off to the races. It is like the market where everyone could freely sell anything he/she wants to sell. In the case of social media, this is where you share your thoughts with almost anything that interests you. Almost anything you want to talk about, look and search things you like can be found here along with the same people that follows your interest too. Music and videos can be used to interact with others. Posting your very own cover of a popular song and getting hits on views in YouTube where YouTube plays the role of the place to where the music you’ve created are shared.
B. EXAMPLES OF SOCIAL MEDIA Though there are many social media sites that we can talk about, I will only cite the most common and probably the well-known ones because the internet is pretty vast to search. First in the list, probably the most popular and there is high possibility that you are using it, is the Facebook. With more than 1 billion users, Facebook is the world’s largest social network. Founder Mark Zuckerberg started Facebook in 2004 while he was an undergraduate computer
science student at Harvard University. Facebook was originally designed to use information from Harvard’s student networks in order to create a dating site for the Harvard elite. Zuckerberg agreed to help with the project, but soon dropped out to work on his own social networking site with friends Dustin Moskovitz, Chris Hughes and Eduardo Saverin. Zuckerberg and his friends created a site that allowed users to create their own profiles, upload photos,and communicate with other users. The group ran the site—first called The Facebook—out of a dorm room at Harvard until June 2004. After his sophomore year, Zuckerberg dropped out of college to devote himself to Facebook full time, moving the company to Palo Alto, California. By the end of 2004, Facebook had 1 million users. Next on the list is Twitter. Twitter is a social network and real-time communication service launched in 2006 and used by millions of people and organizations to quickly share and discover information. The word Twitter comes from the frequent chirping sound made by birds, hence the bird used in the Twitter logo. Users can access the site via the web and mobile devices to exchange frequent bite-size updates of information called 'tweets' which are messages of up to 140 characters long that anyone can send or read. These messages or tweets are public by default and visible to all those who are following the tweeter. Twitter allows you to follow other users you are interested in so that you'll see their updates on your home page, which is an aggregate feed of all the accounts you’re following. Users share these tweets which are micro-bits of information that can contain things like photos, videos, quotes, article links and more. Each tweet can also have replies from other people creating real-time conversations around hot topics, breaking news and interesting new content. Third on the list is YouTube. As a regular internet resident, I often find myself going to YouTube and trying to find some tutorials, news and information about recent events and things or discoveries and also funny cats, babies, comedy clips from various shows which will inevitably lead you to procrastination. YouTube is a website designed for sharing video. Millions of users around the world have created accounts on the site that allow them to upload that anyone can watch. Every minute of every day, more than 35 hours of video is upload to YouTube. Video files can be very large and are often too big to send to someone else by email. By posting a video on YouTube, you can share a video simply by sending the other person a URL ―link‖ – that is, the ―address‖ of the relevant internet page. Companies in the recent years started using the
technology of YouTube to advertise and boost their presence in the globe. Individuals uploading their cover videos of their favorite songs to get views and some even became popular hence the term ―viral video‖ was created. Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim, who created YouTube as a Flickr-style sharing site for videos in February 2005. They posted their first clip, a 19-second shot of Karim at the San Diego Zoo, that April. By November, with the aid of neophyte-friendly uploading software, YouTube users were sending 8 terabytes of data flickering across the Internet every day — the equivalent, Hurley noted, of the entire contents of a Blockbuster store. By the time Google paid $1.65 billion in stock for the company in the fall of 2006, the site boasted more than 700 million views a week. Today more video is uploaded to YouTube in 60 days than all three U.S. television networks have created in 60 years.
C. DIFFERENCE BETWEEN SOCIAL MEDIA AND SOCIAL NETWORK Now that I’ve mentioned earlier what social media means and what it does, then telling you examples of social media sites and mentioning that Facebook is a social networking site can make things difficult for you as you might think that I’m messing with you with the terms ―social media‖ and ―social networking‖ sites. Most people can’t even distinguish between the two. To clear up some things, let us discuss the differences between the two. Let us read a very short that was posted by Open source softies ―You created Twitter account or Facebook account you started adding people in your group as per your preference. Some of them started following you back or some of them accepted your friend request.
Then after a good number of connections with people you started posting messages and no one giving any gestures like a follow or a comment on your post, and then you realize that you created "social media" presence by adding people to your group but there is not networking or 2 way communication happening which is also called as "Social networking"
So you started getting engage with people reading their views and start interacting - That's was the day when you realize that you got how to build relationship by networking with others.”
I think that reading through the story helped us understand the difference between the two is. The author of the post further added that social media, the communication is one way. You created followers or friends. That is all. In social networking the communication works both ways. You have to engage people sometime with pull strategy. Putting some good message and sometimes with push strategy. Communicating and giving your reviews on their post, photos or messages. Also he said that in social media you say to people ―I am here‖ and with social networking you say ―I am here show me some actions and thoughts‖. To wrap things up, social media is the outlet of your ideas. This is where you broadcast yourself let yourself get known by large number of people that interests in your works. This is the strategy that you will use to sell your presence to the world whereas social networking is the act of engagement to communicate with. Using social networking sites can help you build audiences for you to get known in the social media.
