Technology has become part of our daily lives in the last decade. This situation will keep increasing as long as new things are discovered and invented to facilitate life circumstances. Nevertheless, the most important technological factor that has covered our life is the Internet and the biggest aspect of the Internet that affects us in our daily lives is also social media. Especially nowadays, social media platforms are very popular in our lives. In addition, social media is a tool that has enabled people to cause positive changes in society. From my point of view, there are some advantages of social media, such as being aware of events in our environment, communication with other people, and learning technical skills.
The first and the most popular advantage is being aware of events in our environment. To begin with, we can be informed about current news via a lot of applications. For instance, when we sign in our social media account, we can take a quick look to learn what happened in the world or our environment instantly. Secondly, if we live in a remote country from our family, we can contact them and learn new events or situations in our hometown from the first-hand source via FaceTime, Skype, Discord, or Zoom, which are very popular applications nowadays. Thus, our relatives or family members are one click away from us and we can feel them as if they were near us. To summarize, social media makes distances closer and it leads to information sources.
Another advantage of social media is that it helps to increase people’s interaction with others; namely, people can communicate and interact more than ever. Social networks actually make people more relationship-oriented and considerate. For example, they can upload some videos or photos onto their YouTube or Instagram profile and their followers can see their posts. If they like its contents, the followers will share them with their acquaintances. In this way, they can reach wide societies and make new friends. Hence, they have an opportunity to connect with others, speak their mind, and share their talents with the world via social media. In short, it exposes us to different points of view, new ideas, and gives the power to research those opinions and discuss them with others.
The last advantage of social media is learning technical skills. When we want to have information about some issues, social media enables us to learn via videos. As an illustration, when we would like to learn how to make software, we can watch videos about codification and software from a lot of applications such as edX, Khan Academy, Coursera, and so on. Furthermore, if we perceive the mechanism of any application, we can be aware of other application’s algorithms. In other words, if we know how to use Facebook, we can use Instagram easily because both have similar algorithms in terms of sharing mechanisms. In this way, our ability to understand technical information enhances as long as we use various applications. To sum up, spending time online is essential for people to pick up the social technical skills.
All in all, I strongly believe that social media platforms provide their users with a large number of advantages in their lives. Specifically, being aware of the events worldwide, communication with others to enlarge our circle, and learning technical skills to improve ourselves are just a few gains of them for us. It seems to me that we should take the benefits of social media websites instead of constantly criticizing their bad effects. Thus, my advice is “Do not mind the bad side; care about the good side!”