What is Social Media?

          What is social media? This is the question that my professor posed to us this week in class. I could give you the textbook definition for what social media is, but the definition would change from textbook to textbook because social media is so dynamic and massive that an author would never be able to condense the full definition in just a few sentences. This is why I have decided to change the question to this one instead, What is social media to me?

          Social media, to me, means having a platform that allows you to share your ideas and content virtually with people around the world in order to communicate with others in an open forum (the level of openness can be controlled by user settings). Today, I am going to present three different social media platforms to show just how different the ways open forum communication can be.

           Twitter is one virtual platform that people use to communicate through short sentence posts. For example, I was scrolling through my feed on Twitter yesterday morning and came across this post:

just minutes after CNN tweeted this post, friends and fans of Alan Rickman made posts of their own expressing their sadness and sharing memories. Twitter was being used as a platform to express their grief.

          Twitter is just one of many social media sites that people use around the world to communicate. Pinterest is another social media website that people use to communicate with one another, but in a very different way than Twitter. On Pinterest, people communicate things that interest them to a virtual bulletin board like this one: 

instead of messaging each other.

           Facebook will be the final social media platform that I will present this morning has its own unique forms of communication. Many Facebook users communicate by typing up paragraph long Facebook posts like the one below:

and through Facebook webpages created by organizations that allow a group of people to contribute articles and updates on one central page that alerts the followers whenever the page is updated.