Social media are taking over every aspect of life. Young teenagers and older people are on social media and are well connected. Top educational and commercial organisation are heavily involve with social media. Educational organisation use social media to promote/ advertise and create a fan base and commercial websites are used in order to promote their products, provide customers with vocational deals and offer and to advertise. Social media such as facebook are used a lot by university students for group assignments and to socialising, but everyone seems to forget that every coin has 2 sides to it. While people are using social media to its full potential and gaining benefits from it, there are also people who have suffered heavily because of social media.
In the businesses sector organisations are attracting many customer by advertising on social media, but there are organisation who are suffering a lot because of this. For example news channels. Currently the news are feeling under threat as social media are becoming the platform and primary source of news. Even though TV is still the most popular form by which individuals are retrieving news the figures also clearly shows that online social media is catching up with news channels, which can be seen as a hazard by new channels (Quartz.,2015). Whereas social media could be used to promote a business it can really affect the reputation of the company. In 2012, a Korean american women who visited Papa Johns in New York discovered that the sales assistant identified her as a “Lady chinky eyes” she tweeted about this experience and local newspaper published that as a news. Within a few days the news travel from one part of the country on to international level which resulted in giving an organisation bad reputation. (Park.j.,Chaa.M.,Kim.H.,Jeong.j.,2012).
Social media can be very harmful for individual as well as they waste hours daily on social media “socialising”. Privacy is another issue which has been highlighted via many academics and individuals on social. Privacy is definitely something worth considering for individual and social media designer of future. Social media platform do have the potential to reveal confidential information of individuals without their knowledge. uploading inappropriate images and status about work placement can also get individuals in a lot of trouble, some can even end up loosing their jobs. Social media platforms have been blamed repeatedly for cyber bullying over the course of years. Once again uploading images or personal/confidential information regarding individuals on social media can be extremely heartbreaking. Teenagers have committed suicide due to these incidents in the past.
A lot of fake information is also floating around on social media so if you read something, do not believe it immediately. People can use platforms such as Facebook and Twitter in order to create fake profile to harass people. Certain cases can been confirmed where social media website were to conduct social engineering tasks in order to hack confidential information of the organisation. Cases related to music industry as also came forward when the song which was not released yet was published on social media website, which is currently effecting the music industry a lot.
Nevertheless the choice is yours on how you want to use the social media, it can be a great way to social and share information but it could also ruin your life if not used appropriately.
References:
Quartz.,2015. The unstoppable rise of social media as a source of news. Available from: http://qz.com/388418/the-unstoppable-rise-of-social-media-as-a-source-for-news/ [Accessed on 22nd april 2015]
Park.j.,Chaa.M.,Kim.H.,Jeong.j.,2012.Managing Bad News in Social Media: A Case Study on Domino’s Pizza Crisis. Available from: http://www.academia.edu/2428819/Managing_Bad_News_in_Social_Media_A_Case_Study_on_Domino_s_Pizza_Crisis [Accessed on 22nd april 2015]