By Rosette Younis & Brian Kufawatamba Alsayegh Media | May 24, 2012
Isn’t it mind-blowing that just a few years ago in 2005, people had no clue what YouTube was? And in 2006 when a little blue bird tweeted, people thought it was just a passing trend that would be over after 15 minutes of fame.
Today, YouTube has helped launch the careers of stars from Bieber to Obama and everyone in between. Meanwhile, 125 billion friendships have blossomed on Facebook (and a few break-ups as well).
We’ve become so addicted that if a natural disaster swept you to some strange desert island, your first reaction would be to use your mobile to change your location on Foursquare, post photos on Instagram, and change your Facebook status – before it even occurred to you to use your mobile to call for help!
New words like tweeting and pinteresting now rent space in our vocabulary. In 2009 we witnessed the fight for mayorship with Foursquare, in 2010 Instagram visualized our lives and now all we do is pin, pin, pin! If you have no presence in the virtual world, you virtually don’t exist.
Today we wonder how people survived in the “Dark Ages” before the glorious internet. But remember that when previous generations had the old black and white TVs, they thought they had the finest technology. Today we look back and laugh – which means future generations will also laugh at how old-fashioned we were. That’s the beauty of social media: it’s always evolving, so you must stick around to see what happens next!
Thanks to this Darwinian evolution of social media, our status has been updated from digital immigrants to digital natives… and the law of the social jungle is “Survival of the coolest!”
