Not All Bad

It seems as though when people are discussing social media, it is for the most part in a negative light. There are of course negatives to social media like there are to most things, but I think the recent reading, ‘The Future of Well-Being in a Tech-Saturated World’pointed out the importance of how medias have created new ways for us to express ourselves. I found the contentment aspect of benefits of digital life to explain this idea the best, “The vast majority of human ambition and objectives are far more noble: people desire to educate themselves, people desire to communicate with others, people desire to share their experience, people desire to create networks of enterprise, commerce, and culture.” It seems that some people look to media as not simply a way to express yourself but also to improve yourself and explore new ideas. Now more than ever I see people reading the news as it appears on their timeline and finding groups online that they share common interests with. 

While researching other positive effects of social media I came across a video posted by BBC Future called ‘Social Media: How Life Online Makes Us Smarter’ where Clive Thompson discusses the vast opportunities that have come from social media. Thompson discusses how social media has created a place for people to expand their knowledge and their thinking by working together. He also describes a time where he himself feared new technologies as they came out. 

I think that most of the time the negative cloud sometimes thrown over social media just comes from how quickly it became prominent in our lives, but that is not always a bad thing. We now have almost any piece of knowledge we desire at our fingertips, and we have the ability to share that knowledge with others and express our thoughts and ideas.