Connecting The Globe

       In current society, across most cultures, social media is an extremely important tool for citizens to have. We may not immediately realize this because when most of us think about the term “social media”, we think about the meaningless posts about cats and what someone ate today on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. While this is a part of social media, the important thing is that it unites large groups of people and allows them all to communicate with each other. This can be vital in natural disaster situations like the earthquake in China in 2008 as Clay Shirky mentions in “How Social Media can Make History". Thanks to Twitter, citizens were able to report the events that were occurring in real time and so the world was able to respond much quicker than if Twitter didn’t exist. It also helped that the citizens affected were able to tell their first person accounts rather than having biased news reporting the situation, something that happens quite often in countries where government tries to control the media. While some aspects of social media are definitely pointless, if used correctly it is very powerful and will continue to help society evolve and hopefully stop oppressive governments from trying to censor its citizens. Because of this, I believe Social Media is a platform of communication we must all have. Without it, we can potentially end up like China or even worse, maybe even North Korea...no thanks.