Diagram depicting the many different types of social media

Social media are computer-mediated tools that allow people, companies and other organizations to create, share, or exchange information, career interests, ideas, and pictures/videos in virtual communities and networks.

Quotes

• Many of the parents I spoke to worried that their kids’ digital habits — round-the-clock responding to texts, posting to social media, obsessively following the filtered exploits of peers — were partly to blame for their children’s struggles.
  • Benoit Denizet-Lewis, ""Why Are More American Teenagers Than Ever Suffering From Severe Anxiety?", New York Times’ Magazine, (Oct 11, 2017); as quoted in "Anxiety is Now the Most Pressing Mental Health Problem For American Teens" Drake Baer, Thrive Global, (October 16, 2017).

• With social media, the personal becomes the public in a way that a lot of kids don't know how to handle it. Even bullying used to be more of an isolated act. Even if it happened in the lunchroom, ten people would see it. Now a thousand people see it.
  • Guy Diamond in "Anxiety is Now the Most Pressing Mental Health Problem For American Teens" by Drake Baer, Thrive Global, (October 16, 2017).

• How lasting the impact of social media will have is yet to be determined, but one thing for sure, it has turned the chain of influence upside down. Today the reader, the lowly reader, that presumably passive consumer of all the great insight handed down by the reporter, confirmed by the analyst, attested to by the reference customer—this reader, I say, has now become the writer! Except it is not a reader/writer. It is reader/writers at large, many readers, the wisdom (or madness) of crowds. We have embarked upon the world's largest and longest cocktail party, and every issue imaginable is up for grabs.
  • Paul Gillin, ‎Geoffrey A. Moore (2009), The New Influencers: A Marketer's Guide to the New Social Media. p. vii

• All that stuff about mainstream social media is interesting enough, which is to say not at all interesting.
  • Lee Konstantinou, Johnny Appledrone vs. the FAA in Ed Finn & Kathryn Cramer (eds.) Hieroglyph: Stories and Visions for a Better Future (2014), ISBN 978-0-06-220469-1, p. 199

• If you want to help the cause of informational freedom, which is the only true religion, your talents as a social media consultant are irrelevant.
  • Lee Konstantinou, Johnny Appledrone vs. the FAA in Ed Finn & Kathryn Cramer (eds.) Hieroglyph: Stories and Visions for a Better Future (2014), ISBN 978-0-06-220469-1, p. 200

• It's unbearable to think any young person should feel there is no other option but to end their life because of bullying on social networking sites.
  • Claire Lilley, NSPCC safer technology expert, quoted in BBC News, "One in five children bullied online, says NSPCC survey", August 11, 2013.

• Social media makes it extraordinarily easy to join crusades, express solidarity and outrage, and shun traitors. Facebook was founded in 2004, and since 2006 it has allowed children as young as 13 to join. This means that the first wave of students who spent all their teen years using Facebook reached college in 2011, and graduated from college only this year.
  These first true “social-media natives” may be different from members of previous generations in how they go about sharing their moral judgments and supporting one another in moral campaigns and conflicts. We find much to like about these trends; young people today are engaged with one another, with news stories, and with prosocial endeavors to a greater degree than when the dominant technology was television. But social media has also fundamentally shifted the balance of power in relationships between students and faculty; the latter increasingly fear what students might do to their reputations and careers by stirring up online mobs against them.

• Greg Lukianoff, Jonathan Haidt, "The Coddling of the American Mind", The Atlantic, (September 2016).

• Late capitalism is like your love life: it looks a lot less bleak through an Instagram filter.
  • Laurie Penny, "Life Hacks of the Poor and Aimless."

• Listening continuously and taking notes for an hour is an unusual cognitive experience for most young people. Professors should embrace — and even advertise — lecture courses as an exercise in mindfulness and attention building, a mental workout that counteracts the junk food of nonstop social media.
  • Molly Worthen "Lecture me. Really." The New York Times October 17, 2015.

See also

• Internet
• Mass media
• Online safety

External links