Is social media a boon to mankind??
Answers
When the internet was created, perhaps no one was aware of its potential. It was just a convenience for sharing of information across some computers. Starting from ARPANET in 1960, passing through TCP/IP technology, today there is a social media system which brings us so close that as if time and distance stand reduced almost to zero. All of us who are on social media are from different parts of the globe, perhaps from places which we may not see during our lifetime, yet we are Facebooked, Twittered, Linkined, WhatsApped, and so on.
Social media has brought the world so close that political and geographical boundaries are crumbling. Time may come when netizenship may surpass citizenship. The more people-to-people communication is, the more is the strengthening of relationships. This is the basic principle of the political concept of nation-building. In an information society, bonds grow stronger. We are now heading towards a world-order of Net-state or states. In between, an ominous development of misuse of social media has cropped up.
A serious problem is that the spread of misinformation can severely impact the decision-making process. This is because we are closer in the virtual world but far away in the physical world. It was way back in 1993, a cartoon appeared in the New Yorker with the caption, “On the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog”. Digital culture has become so widespread that whatever appears on the Net, is readily accepted. Cross-check is almost nil. It is a dangerous trend. The children today believe more in the popular search engine than anything else. That is why fake news goes viral almost instantly through social media forwards. It has a cascading effect. Not only the problem is of magnitude but also in not being able to find its source also.
.