Future of Social Media, Where is it headed?
Introduction
You are much more acquainted with the settings of your Facebook account than the mapping of your house in the city or the tweets made by your favorite star than the favorite dish of your mother. Aren’t you? This is what social media does to you. It puts you in a cage, inside the network of these seemingly astonishing social media apps and websites.
Before the introduction of Facebook in the year of 2004, on February 4, social media has changed from a caterpillar to a butterfly with an entire paradigm shift of how the communication takes place. No more the pigeon post, the world communicates in seconds through Whatsapp, Facebook status and posts, uploading photos over Instagram or pinning photos on pinterest. This is how people socialize and get to know about one another. Business deals are passed on in emails and immediate help is received, no matter what is the situation.
The power of social media has been exponentially increasing. With 1.3 billion active Facebook user and 82% of them from US and Canada, the number stands in support of the fact. Twitter also boasts of a 270 million active user base with 500 million tweets in a day. Not just this, everyday YouTube encounters watching of 4 billion videos along with 60 million photos uploaded on Instagram.
An estimate says that e-market projects shall see an increase of 32.7% with around 2.44 billion people on the internet.
No one could have ever thought that the course of communication would be changed to this extent by Facebook or any other social media. Many good things came up with lots of new opportunities, but few things inevitably worse also creeps up in the system. So, somehow we can put it as, no one can decide how shall be the future of social media. Well, few of the known celebrities have made predictions stated as follows.
Current Place in Our Lives
Piera Geladri, a 29 year old creative director states that whatever happens in the somewhat 25 years ahead in the future can be seen as a work of science fiction with mobile phones and wearables being the first step towards it. There might be instances of shared consciousness and versions of telepathic communication.
Sarah Green, a senior associate editor and host of HBR Ideacast, states that after 20 to 25 years, the social media won’t be just confined to standalone apps but more as “piping” of the Internet. It shall be just like electricity, an unseen part of the infrastructure whose presence is only realized in its absence.One day, all of us from the 80’s and the 90’s generation would be stuck by nostalgia on just the sight of the old typewriter, or a newspaper or maybe a real conversation.
Well, it is all up to us, how these social media apps and websites are used. But all we can say is, nothing is predictable. Since the advent of Internet, nothing has been simple or naïve, everything has been evolving and advancing. So,there would be too much to see and figure, let’s wait and see, what future has in store for the bird named social media.
