Social Media

Several years ago when we were about to enter college, my friend set up his first online blog site and it became an instant hit with my other batchmates. Others followed soon.
Here are just some of the many social media that my classmates started to use about then:
Networking: Facebook. Friendster
Blogs: Livejournal, Xanga, Blogger
MicroBlog: Twitter, Plurk.. and many others.
Others also use Youtube as a way of posting personal opinions with the aid of videos. They create their own Youtube accounts and narrate (monologue) their own emotions, adventures or express it in creative forms using video elements inciting opinion and action.
My friend is a prolific writer, a computer whiz and a great traveler in his own country. It was during first year that I start to notice how these online diaries created a new way of experiencing people and their ideas even though we do not see them as often anymore. Though he studied in Singapore and we never met for almost 5 years it is as if I am walking beside the person along with his adventures every time I read his blog. There he talked about his daily school encounters abroad, his passions, emotions and great experiences. He talks about movie, local politics and essays. He publicizes his stands on issues regarding our country. He keeps on posting countless photos, videos and links that become flooded with comments each day. He is one of our popular classmates and up to now he comes to our attention time and time again unlike the others who seemed to have been lost simply because they failed to keep their online diaries.
The web has now become the only feasible environ I have known to once again feel the presence of my busy acquaintances. Gone were the times where old friends meet along the way and with great enthusiasms “slap” each other’s hands in excitement. Today we meet people everyday in our cars, malls, or in the very comfort of our own homes anytime. Online blogs have virtually empowered people with virtual ubiquity.
At first I thought blogs are just another fancy tools people use to make themselves popular. But later in my college life I noticed how business establishments utilize these kinds of social networking and web based social media in order to promote their products or sell ideas. They even used their blog sites to sell products and become hubs or trade centers.
Setting aside the business perspective, there is another very important role social media played in our country for the past year. During the height of “Ondoys” wrath blogs and networking sites became indispensable in saving lives. They became good sources of timely information, cheap and considerable reliable.
Social media has its advantages from making money, informal learning and sharing opinions. It is a media designed to disseminate through social interaction, created using highly accessible and scalable publishing techniques. With regards to its significance it supports the democratization of knowledge and information, transforming people from content consumers into content producers. One notable example is Wikipedia. With Wikipedia’s many online technologies it is able to set up a very useful information database that is being updated very often at an impressive rate by thousands of tens of thousands of authors around the world.
Hence social media is not just another fad we would soon get over with but is a very important tool for us to share information in times of disaster and peace and even breathe life to our everyday experience allowing others to conveniently enjoy what we experience in this busy days.