Social media is something that permeates everyday life in just about any first world country. The majority of people have learned to engage with it in some amount whether it’s just checking Facebook to stay updated with friends, or using Twitter to voice a political opposition. If we think about social media in terms of literacy we can see how people have learned to work with the constraints and advantages of it. Through Twitter people have learned to make concise statements with the word limitations, condensing their messages to fit the limitation while still trying to be understood. Or with things like Facebook and Reddit where a lot of the communication does not just consist of written words, but also images, videos, and music.
I think it’s interesting how older people feel that the newer generations have become dumber and less refined as a result of social media, but I feel like it’s the opposite. We’ve learned to engage with other people in a variety of ways, making a lot of our dumb messages more humorous or a political protest more impactful by learning to use the different tools that social media gives us.
