Social Media Impact

Social Medias’ Impact on Church and Family

Social Media Overview

The Oxford dictionary defines social media as “Websites and applications that enable users to create and share content or to participate in social networking” (Oxford Dictionary), but that really online provides us a ten thousand foot view of one of the most influential technology phenomenon of this century. Social media can trace its beginnings back to 1978 when two Chicago computer enthusiast built the first Bulletin Board System (BBS) as a way to keep up to date with friends (Walker, 2011). Social media saw its first peek at mainstream acceptance in 1999 with the launch of a social media site in Great Britain called Friends Reunited. This sites sole focus was to link past classmates together. The United States saw its first social media site appear in 2002 with the launch of Friendster, which quickly grew to three million users in three months. Social media really began to reach the public consciousness in 2003 with the launch of the Friendster clone, MySpace. That same year, the pioneering business social media site LinkedIn was launched. In 2004 social media giant Facebook was launched for students at Harvard University. By 2005 the social media revolution had begun and social startups were popping up across the web (Curtis, 2013) and mainstream users were hooked.

Today three quarters of the worlds online users are active on social media. When you consider that 85% of the worlds 7.1 billion people have Internet access, you start to grasp the impact that sites like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn have on our society (Smith, 2011). According to research by Ipsos Open Thinking Exchange (OTX), the average social media user between the age of 18-64 spend 3.2 hours per day engaging with social sites (Marketing Charts Staff, 2013). What drive this need for digital social interaction? Nearly two thirds of social media users assign the desire to stay in touch with family and friends as the primary...