Will Social Media Bring Us Social Change?

Social change has happened many times before. Events like Technological change that led to moving away from manual labor to automated production lines. Or Modernization, which led us into an industrial society. Or even Urbanization, where large populations live in urban areas instead of rural areas. But will Social Media bring about a real social change?

When I think about the examples I listed above, I think about large groups of people and large amounts of time. Technological, Modernization and Urbanization didn’t happen overnight, nor did they come about from the ideas and efforts of a few individuals. Social Media definitely has enough ideas and people driving it to become a “way of life” for some or even part of all of our lives every day. The only difference is Social Media is still fairly new, if you were to put it on a timeline, in relation to the scale of how long Technological, Modernization and Urbanization took to become a true social change, social media would look like a baby.

 I guess talking about Urbanization or Modernization would be a little more of an extreme than true Technological change, we see Technological change all the time. But of the three, Technological change has shaped and even caused social media to exist in the first place.

So it all comes down to will we all truly accept Social Media as a norm, as a way we live our lives, how we communicate, or even how we do business? For the most part I truly believe that we already have. And that we are seeing the social change every day. Sure at the moment it might not seem like all that much has changed, but that’s because we’re seeing it every day. Look at it this way, pretend its 2000 and you just turned X years old. The internet is still a myth to most at home; we all use home phones or the postal service (remember Canada Post?) for communications and the classifieds to look for jobs or items for sale. Now you wake up one morning and its 2011! You have these weird concepts like Facebook, Twitter, Linkden, Flicker. What’s happening in the world is being told to you from people living the events in real time, you can post your resume and network with professionals to find jobs, you can follow your friends or favorite celebrities on their day to day lives, all from your PC or smart phone! Now that would be a change! But that’s because you didn’t live it every day. 

So has Social Media actually brought about Social Change? You bet it has, were the pioneers of that change and living through it as you read this post on my Blog.