Social media has become a significant part of our daily lives. We use it to connect with our loved ones, to catch up on current events, and of course, as a form of entertainment. This is probably the reason why just under 70 percent of Americans, and more than 2.6 billion people globally are always on social media. However, this wasn’t always the case. Back in just 2005, social media penetration in the U.S. was just 5 percent, and most of the rest of the world didn’t even know what it was
Definition of Social Media
For most of us, we can easily spot social media when we see it, but we should work to be a bit more specific. If you try searching for its definition on google there will be countless of results, but of course they will all reflect the following definition one way or another. Basically social media is defined as the different forms of online communication used by people to create network, communities, and collectives to share information, ideas, messages, and other content, such as videos.
Given the stated definition, we can understand social media to be a wide range of things, such as messaging apps like WhatsApp and Vibe, profile based platforms such as Facebook, Instagram by using private instagram viewer
Rapid Growth of the Internet
The internet has its roots in the 1960s and 1970s when various private and public organizations were working to try and find ways to get computers to communicate with one another. In a sense, this can be considered as the beginning of social media. However, it wasn’t until the 1980s, and really the 1990s, that personal computers became more normal, which set the stage for the emergence of social media.
Social Media Today
The history of social media is relatively short in terms of time, but this doesn’t make it any less exciting or influential. Today, social media is an integral part of the lives of people around the world. Overall, there are some 2.62 billion social media users around the world, and this number is expected to grow to over 3 billion by 2021