Nowadays the most important
part of social media is making sure you're a part of social media. Adults,
young adults in particular, are obsessed with keeping up with the latest news
and trends that circulate throughout social media. If it's new and everyone
else is doing it, you can bet your ass they will be too.
There
are two common types of trends nowadays:
- Long
term, or more permanent
AND
- Short
term, or more temporary
Long
term social media are things like websites and apps for your smartphone or
tablet, such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, and others of
the like -- essentially they're those things that take up the biggest part of
our time whenever we're on our phones.
These
are things like the ALS
Ice Bucket Challenge;
Or the Kylie
Jenner Lip Challenge (which,
if you didn't know, is a horrible idea - basically turns you into a character
from Monsters Inc);
Or the
debate over the
color of one simple dress (and
for the record, neuroscientists discovered the answer: it's blue).
The interesting thing is that the longer term trends seem to be focused more on us - on Facebook and Twitter it's all about updating our status, and Instagram and Snapchat are about sharing pictures of what we are doing.
The shorter term trends, however, seem to be about others, and how we can take part in them; the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge, the Kylie JennerLip Challenge, and the "is it blue or is it gold?" debate over the dress -- all are trends that stemmed from other people, that we then ingrained ourselves into. And, once we have exhausted the trend and it no longer benefits or focuses on us, we move on to the next one just as quickly as we'd jumped onto the bandwagon with the previous ones.
No wonder the older generation is always wagging their
fingers at us...
Tsk tsk
tsk...
- Robyn
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