How Social Media Platforms and My Usage of them Have Changed Over Time
The earliest memories I have of using digital media are watching minecraft Youtube videos on my Kindle Fire in sixth grade and pretty much all throughout middle school. I would come home from school everyday and get my homework done as fast as possible so I could watch Youtube late into the night until I fell asleep. For me, it was better than watching TV. Here was a platform that I could watch wherever I wanted, as long as I had an internet connection, and I could watch stuff that I was actually interested in and actually participated in myself. Then in sophomore year of highschool, I made my first Instagram account. It was a whole new way for me to view content. I could see stuff that my friends create as well as all of the things that huge stars and influencers are creating. It was short content that I could quickly scroll through and watch or read if I didn’t have time to watch an entire youtube video. Fast forward to now, I am a sophomore in college and I still use both Youtube and Instagram for entertainment purposes, but I have evolved in the way I use them. I find myself more often then not using them to keep up with stuff going on in the world (politics, events, general news, etc.), and to learn new things, either for class or just for my own curiosity.
With social media platforms being out for quite some time now, people have really become much more professional and creative with the way they put out content on them. Platforms like Youtube really started out as just a few people posting silly videos that they recorded with their phones, however the content on the site quickly started becoming more and more complicated. Now, there are full on movies and tv shows being put out on Youtube by both creators and big film companies. The amount of effort required to gain traction on any social media platform, not just Youtube, nowadays requires much more effort and attention to detail compared to when these platforms first began.
My understanding of social media platforms (as a user not a creator), along with others, has had to evolve with it. I used to see it as just something to entertain myself with to distract me from school or if I was just having a bad day. Now, I see it as something that is not just a silly waste of time, but as something that people have turned into a career either by becoming a content creator or getting a social media position at a big company (which is becoming a bigger job field by the day).
“We are in full PR-mode of ourselves. We are now living our lives for the Instagram photo” -Gary Vaynerchuk
Social media has become such a huge a part of everyday life that people (not just creators) are starting to revolve their lives around it. Everything is tied to how they can take a photo, a video, or create some other piece of content about what is going on in their lives.
Since social media platforms were introduced, companies have found multitudes of different ways to make access to it even easier, due to its continuously increasing popularity. Social media platforms first started off as websites, but then companies turned made them compatable with people’s phones as an app. People could now access their social media platforms from anywhere in the world, and they did not have to use their computer at home. This has been by far the most popular way to consume content, and will be for a very long time in the future to come. Recently, in the past few years, you can now access social media platforms like Youtube and Twitch on your smart tv. Long gone are the days of staring at your tiny phone screen to watch videos and livestreams. Another way companies have given people access to social media, and the most important one to me, is through gaming consoles. Not only can I watch videos and livestreams from my console, but I can now create them too. This is huge for someone like me who would like to turn creating gaming content into a career. Something that used to require lots of expensive equipment and exstensive amounts of tech knowledge, I can now do just by clicking a button in an app.
