Matthew Gates 2m 461 #socialmedia
The views of this article are the perspective of the author and may not be reflective of Confessions of the Professions.
I am a millennial and I was born in the 1980s. My introduction to computers was on a Pentium II, which was the greatest technology at the time, and was powerful enough to run Doom in DOS, Putt Putt, and Windows 3.1. Offline, the Atari was the thing to do. But even more fun, going outside and playing tag football, tackle football, or catching lightning bugs, or even, if you were a pryo like me, setting non-animate things on fire and watching them burn.
I was born in a time where most Microsoft applications were still the best thing a computer had to offer. Of course, nowadays, there are so many small business software companies and open source software advocates that you have your choices. Sure, Microsoft or Apple products might be considered “official”, but sometimes, unofficial is just as amazing. I actually use a Linux computer on the Brave browser and have a bunch of installed applications and extensions that try to keep me as private as possible.
I grew up remembering Facebook as a fledgling platform, and LinkedIn and Twitter, and so on and so forth. These weren’t the norm or the trusted, but the used, until they weren’t. These applications are now everyday life. No one born in this world will not know what life was like before they existed, yet I do remember: life was, in a way, actually better, yet worse.
To elaborate on that: it is far better to know that we have Facebook, Twitter, Fiverr, and other platforms that can connect us with the entire world. Running a programming group of 300,000 people, many whom are developers or learning, has its advantages, as it provides access to thousands of real programmers, developers, software engineers, across the world.
With unlimited YouTube and Tiktok access to uploads and viewing, the possibilities of a virtual world are endless. Humans who have social media and try to record all of life’s experience and share it with the world are doing what they believe is best for the world: sharing it with others. Even at the time, Yahoo was the biggest, while Google was still a fledgling, learning and indexing everything, trying to understand how it would use this data to change the world, for the better, while also profiting on the process, in order to keep running.
The evolution of technology has ultimately made propaganda easier to access, and fool the world, whether true or false in any statement. Yet it has also changed the world by allowing us access to each other from around the world in seconds. If someone in China has a conversation with me and we both agree to meet and speak at a certain time. I am doing what my ancestors never dreamed of doing.
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