By OSAM SAKAMOTO
Columnist
Lately the expansion of social media is becoming one of the most favored topics in the world. I bet that everybody around us has heard of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, and Vine. Even some of you might be a user of one of these or multiple services. In fact these internet services have successfully seized their best seats to influence the world, wrestling each other to gain further users.
Like everybody else, I am also a user of social media. I usually spend less than an hour each day, using social media, or technically stating, watching skate videos on these services. And there goes a sweet trap that social media bring us. If you are familiar to YouTube, it would be easier to explain. Whenever I click a video, YouTube will suggest me several more videos I might be also fascinated in. Since I am a skateboard “freak,” I often end up surfing all over the suggestion column, seeking for legendary skating montages.
Yet, spending some time on social media other than YouTube may occur. It may be Facebook or Twitter. Or we might log in to Myspace, which miserably failed to be one of the best social media outlets as if it had fallen hard on ice and never got back up. Hence I must admit that these successful social media, unlike Myspace, are working on their best services. But what are exactly the best services? They should be the matter of convenience, which is an important factor.
Talking about convenience, usage of smartphones is probably significant today. Let’s see how many of us have a smartphone. Looking around, we can notice that many of us use it. If you are a college student, you might need an instant access to blackboard to check class contents or assignments. And these intelligent phones made it possible to access to the internet without a laptop. As a matter of fact, they stabilized a way to get to social media: We can watch funny videos on YouTube, we can tweet about a song we just heard on a radio, and we are also able to post what we ate for dinner on Facebook. Text to post is a handy way to share our event to subscribers or followers as well.
Social network services often allow users to subscribe to an organization, famous person, their interest, or even their friend. All users need to do in order to receive the latest posts is to tap an icon of an app on the touchscreen. Users are able to check their timeline just in seconds. As a result, social media may cause users to get addicted to the nicely-made virtual world.
By having an easy access and useful functions, social media can gain more users. Additionally, our addiction to social media definitely changes the degree of how successful the companies are. But in fact, we do not need to waste our precious time on social media. Grab whatever you are hugely into, and live your life!