Before the days of Friendster and Myspace, the internet was a place of forums and one-to-one messaging. Between pseudo anonymous forums like The WELL, short away messages on AIM, and dial-up connections, these web based technologies and platforms have drastically changed over the past 32 years and are becoming forgotten relics of the past.
The emergence of what we know social media to be today is only due to the advancement and adoption of technology. If it were not for high speed wireless connections and smartphones, Instagram and Snapchat would not exist in their current forms. For Facebook to expand beyond their humble beginnings as a ripoff of Hot or Not, they had to add functionality like Farmville and open their network outside of colleges. LinkedIn on the other hand would probably be about the same, even with a dial-up connection.
Jokes aside, the way we communicate and the software we use today are only in place because of the technology we have adopted. How will that change over the course of the next 20 years? Certainly that would be impossible to tell, but it certainly won’t stop us from musing about it. We also asked some of the DC Social Media community to see what they had to say, and this is what we came up with:
More of the Same or Completely Different?
In 5 years, will social media involve a drastic overall or more of the same? It would be a stretch to say that things such as AR and VR will already be widely adopted, but when those do come into play we may see many of the same interaction types.
“The core basics will still be experiences (photos, video, live video, VR + AR possibilities, etc) and interactions (views, likes, followers, comments, or other interactions we haven’t thought of yet). I do believe the trend of Social media startups will stay vastly more in the direction of in the moment experiences rather than posts that live on forever,” stated District Interactive’s Raj Vasa.
Regardless of the technology that comes into play, social media will also become fully normalized in our society. Take for example Oreos, kleenex, and Google. Before these brands became what we know them as today we had Hydrox cookies, facial tissues, and search engines. Similar in nature, we’re already turning Facebook, Snap, and Insta into verbs in place of actions like updating our friends and family to life events, taking pictures of our dogs, and probably also still taking pictures of our dogs. Into the future, social media as a term will only further embed itself in our language as a form of communication.
“I think we won’t even call it social media – it will just be how we communicate. Not about being ‘social’ or sharing, just interacting with others,” stated LKC Technologies Senior Director of Marketing and Former President of DC Social Media Club Larissa Schimel.
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Source: Tech.co