Senior English major
The other day, my 14-year-old sister told me she doesn’t go on Facebook anymore because it’s “not cool.” That really threw me off. As all my Facebook friends know, I’m still fairly active on my page; for people my age, the site still seems to be a means of communication and a medium for sharing thoughts. So it got me thinking about the progression of social media in general and the potential reasoning behind its rises and falls in popularity.
Now, I don’t think of my sister as being in a “different generation” from me — she’s only six years younger, and because we have another sister splitting the difference between our ages, it never seemed like that big of a gap. But when it comes to technological innovations, it seems like even a one-year age difference can impact how a person uses different social media platforms.
When this year’s college seniors started high school, Facebook expanded to include more than just college students. But for this year’s college freshmen — a class that my middle sister is a part of — Facebook opened up when they were in sixth grade. And for my youngest sister and her classmates, Facebook became a part of growing up.
Apparently, that very presence has caused Facebook to lose its appeal for the kids who hardly ever have known life without it.
The people who seem to have embraced Facebook more in the past few years are part of our parents’ generation. Perhaps this has contributed to the disenchantment today’s kids have with the social media site. Because their parents are posting statuses to share their opinions and uploading pictures that very well may embarrass their kids, Facebook is thought of as something older people use to communicate with their friends. (Conversely, older generations still typically see the site as geared toward young people, which is somewhat ironic.) In fact, an article in The Guardian reports Facebook is “an obligatory communication tool that younger people maintain because everyone else does.”
And that’s what it seems people my age use social media to accomplish. As college students, we generally use Facebook to communicate and keep tabs on one another’s lives. Plus, companies and news outlets have adapted to use social media for customer service and promotion. Even The Diamondback has changed — and surprisingly, we generally get more traffic from Facebook than Twitter. (It’s probably a result of Twitter’s influx of information that people must choose more sparingly when they should react.)
But Facebook has caused younger people to turn to other sources for self-expression and communication. And in turn, this has led people to create more websites and applications to feed this need. My 14-year-old sister uses Instagram more than any other platform to share her thoughts. According to an Al Jazeera article, “‘My mom’s on Facebook’: Teens unfriending network,” young people now report spending more time using Instagram and Snapchat than updating their Facebook.
My 18-year-old sister prefers perusing Twitter. I’m still partial to Facebook, but I know many of my peers have forsaken it for the anonymity of Reddit or the more personal interactions of messaging apps such as WhatsApp, WeChat and KakaoTalk.
So what will come of all this? It seems that in our ever-changing world of technology, we are constantly left guessing where entrepreneurship and innovation will lead us. But it’s interesting to take a look at history when considering what is going to happen in the future.
I consider social media an extension of art and literature, in a way, as paintings and novels used to be the primary way to share ideas and communicate. Now, everything has become abbreviated and stripped down to the bare minimum for grammar and syntax. And many consider the art form of literature to be dying (which I don’t agree with, but that’s another conversation). It certainly has become less popular — forsaken for the easier methods available online. But does that mean eventually all these forms of social media, developed through technological innovation — as literature was with the printing press, allowing people to become literate — will become obsolete? It seems that process has already begun.
It will be interesting to see what innovators will come up with next. Let’s hope it doesn’t allow for the deterioration of literacy and intelligence.
Maria Romas is a senior English major. She can be reached at mromasdbk@gmail.com.
