Since its inception, the media has always played its most important role of making information available to large populations. It started off by the town criers making important announcements in public places, gradually shifting to newer forms of media like newspapers, magazines and radio. As technology began developing, television became the most common form of medium to access information and news. Very recently, mobile phones with internet connectivity have become the easiest and quickest form of media platforms.
Further, with the coming of social media, the spread of news, information and content has become a child’s play. People are thus, not just receiving information, but are also sharing and creating it.
With the advent of innumerable social media platforms, the lines between their uses and motives have blurred. Almost anybody and everybody has started using media platforms, especially digital media platforms, be it of any use to them or not.
It is important to understand the medium and its main purpose before you start using it. For example, one must not upload selfies or a picture of them with their group of friends on LinkedIn as it is a platform to build professional connections.
Every platform caters to a different need as well as the audience. The kind of content that is shared and circulated too differs on every platform. Let us understand what this accurately means.
Facebook is a platform that enables people to connect with a huge number of people, both known and unknown. It is an informal platform where people upload their personal photographs or even post their personal views and opinions. Not just this, the users can also share posts uploaded by others. You can also share news links and memes. Facebook is all about liking, sharing and tagging. However, there are many facebook users who share innumerable photographic images on Facebook. For viewing images on Facebook, one has to click on the post to view all images. No one has the time to open the facebook albums and then view and like all the images.
Instagram, on the other hand, is a pure photo and also a video sharing app that is all about double tapping and scrolling. The main motive of this platform is to share eye appealing images with one line captions. You can also share your personal images but they are more well received if they are ‘photographic’ in nature.
However, the users seem to have decided to ignore the main purpose of these social media platforms and share whatever they feel like. One of the most appropriate examples of this would be the new feature started by Whatsapp messenger. Whatsapp messenger is an app that is used to text and communicate with your all those in your phone contacts, and not to share images in your stories. The primary use of WhatsApp is to communicate, however, it is used more to show people what he/she is doing by adding an image in the story. To share the live moments of one’s day/life, Snapchat and Instagram still exist. People need to realise this.
The same applies for twitter. Twitter’s main use is to share short and quick news updates and local news and updates about the surroundings, but many Twitter users share their images on Twitter, which is like the worst thing to do.
In spite of having different social media platforms that cater to different set of purposes, people still put these platforms to the wrong use. Even though most of the social networking sites enables its users to share images, videos, send direct messages, like, share and comment on the content uploaded, it is crucial to understand the primary motive of each of these platforms before you use it instead of just going about opening an account on all of these and posting the way you want.
