The Power of Modern Communication

Can you imagine communication without social media or call/text? It would take days to communicate across a city and weeks across the country. Out world would be disconnected compared to today’s standards. This was the world not too long ago, communication was much slower and less efficient.

Since social media, our communication has improved greatly because social media is the fastest way to communicate a long distance, the best way one person or group can start a huge movement, and a great way for anyone to know what is happening on a global scale. No-one can deny that social media and texting is the fastest ways to communicate among someone you are not currently with. I have used text many times to talk with my friends and family while at school, at home, or on vacation almost instantly. When I was trying to work out my schedule with band and soccer, I used text to talk to my mom to work out what I can do. The only more efficient way to work out my schedule was to have both my teacher and my mom present, but since that was not an option, text was the next best thing.

Another way social media has helped communication is that one person can start a large-scale event and get many people involved who would not previously have know about it. One great example is the Batkid event in San Francisco where the Make-A-Wish Foundation posted on social media that a kid’s dream was to be batman, and thousands of people joined the cause and made San Francisco Gotham for a day, allowing him to live his dream. This would never have been possible on as large of a scale without social media. Another example of someone using social media to start a movement is the occupy wall street campaign, where social media was used to get many people who agree with the movement involved. This is shown in an article from the Huffington Post by Craig Kanalley, where he wrote “more than 450000 Facebook users have joined the Occupy Wall Street pages.

” Without social media, these events would never have been possible because not as many people would have known about them and they would not have spread and caught on as well as they did. Some people will argue that social media has made the world less connected because majority of users primarily communicate with their friends, but these events prove them wrong. All it takes is one of the “minority” to discover and share it with their friends and it will spread like wildfire. Social media has also allowed anyone with access to the internet to know what is going on across the world. Since the internet is on a global scale, people in one country can spark an interest in a different country about the issues they are facing at their home.

According to Jennifer Brannock Cox, this occurred in Egypt, Tunisia, and Libya, where many people rallied support from other countries by posting on social media. Many people across the world saw some of these posts and convinced their home country to help out. Another great example is one I have seen on my own, where people I know heard about the attack in Brussels and Paris on social media before any news channel covered it. These go to show how connected social media has made the world. Overall, social media has greatly improved our ability to communicate because it is almost instant, it allows many people to join for a cause they support, and it gives people a great way to know what is going on outside of their own society.

As long as there is something to say, social media will be there to help us say it.