The internet, well mostly social media, has become more frustrating in the past 5 years. Wael Ghonim, a person who works at
Google, had a presentation and talked about social media. He started off by saying he made a fake
Facebook account to make a campaign to stop the India attacks. The campaign got so popular that it had a lot of supporters and started a revolution. You can see how well social media can start things. He also talked about how social media can be troubling for some people. He was saying how there are challenges for social media.
The first challenge he started off with was, "We don't know how to deal with rumors. There are too many of them." This is true, there are too may rumors on social media to know which are real and which are fake. That rumor saying Michael Jackson was still alive, people were wondering if he wasn't dead. But they haven't realized that if he was still alive, people would have found out already. You have to ask yourself
if this is true, why would someone tell the public that? Social media is basically filled with rumors now. Next in his presentation, he said "We create our own echo chambers, we block out people we don't want to talk to or just for no reason." If you been on any social media site, you would know that you can block people. This most useful if people are being annoying, but it can be really annoying if people just block you for no reason. You always have to have a reason to block someone. For the next challenge, he stated that " Online discussions quickly turn into an angry mob. A little comment about something can turn into a big online fight that can escape into the real world." This challenge is mostly seen on
Youtube (a website where you post videos). Say you went on
Youtube to see a video about the 2016 Presidential Debate and then scrolled down to see the comments. People would comment
Donald Trump is bad and people would reply
no he isn't Trump 2016. Then more people would join in make a big deal out of it. The fourth challenge he said was " It becomes hard to change our opinions online." He's basically saying be careful what you say on social media. The final challenge he said was " Social media is designed where in a way that favors broadcasting over engagements." Wael's just stating that social media can get out of hand.
Wael also said that there are some suggestion to stop these problems. The first one he started off with was " Get rid of the trolls. Trolls are people on the internet that like to joke around for attention." Trolls are really annoying. They would just make something up when they don't really mean it just for attention. It's like, why would you even do that? Do you really want to be "that" guy? Instead of trying to act like a person that's bored and wants attention, try to help others stop the people trolling. The other suggestion he presented was what if we put more focus on the comments we post. He said "What if we put more focus on quality? What is more important, the number of views on a comment, or the impact of the comment on people?" You should really just focus on what the comment says instead of saying something random and trying to get views. If you say something random, it might turn into a riot. But if you focus on the quality of it, people might take it as an okay comment. So after all of this, social media is still about the media, pictures and stuff. But if we focus more on what we're actually saying and doing on these social media websites, there won't be any problems.