The Rise of Social Media
https://ourworldindata.org/rise-of-social-media
This data-heavy article revolves around how popular social media sites and applications, such as Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook, rose in popularity. Facebook, the largest social media platform in the world, currently has over 2 billion users. Other social media platforms, including YouTube, Instagram, and WhatsApp, have more than 1 billion users each. In fact, the first social media site to reach a million monthly active users was MySpace; however, its popularity clearly declined, as Facebook, YouTube, and other social media platforms were created. Overall, these numbers are clearly large, especially when taking into account the current world population. As of 2019, there are 7.7 billion people in the world, with at least 3.5 billion people online, implying that social media platforms are used by approximately one-in-three people in the world. Undeniably, social media has had drastic impacts on the world – from how information is currently accessed to how the number of connections among people have substantially increased. Furthermore, the rise of social media involves many key trends. For instance, different social media platforms have gained popularity among varying subsets of the population that share a common characteristic, such as age, country, gender.
We can view the rise of social media from a graphical perspective. Since MySpace was considered to be the first social media platform, the initial state of the world when social media was initially gaining popularity can be thought about as a network of people where each person had selected MySpace. In 2004, Facebook was created. Clearly, the first adopters of Facebook included mostly Harvard students. Since Harvard University undoubtedly consists of many influential people, it is no surprise that this new idea of Facebook was able to diffuse through a world network consisting of 7.7 billion people. Currently, there are around 2.5 daily active Facebook users. Although this number is extremely impressive and shows the extent to which new ideas can diffuse through in large networks, there clearly is a not a full cascade, which implies that there must be many clusters in the world network. A possible cluster in the world network is probably the cluster of people that do not have access to the internet. These people are most likely all connected to each other as they are from the same region of the world and are probably connected to a very few number of people outside this cluster, resulting in this cluster having a high density and thus, making it difficult for new ideas to spread to this portion of the world population. To add on, according to the article, Snapchat and Instagram have an extremely steep “age gradient,” where the popularity of these platforms drops much faster with age. This can, once again, be explained by the appearance of clusters in the world network. People are more likely to be friends (and connected) with one another if they are around the same age. So, the idea of Snapchat and Instagram must have been easily diffused through the portions of the world network that consisted of younger people, since the initial adopters were generally also from that age group. All in all, the rise of social media platforms is an extremely prominent example of how new ideas can diffuse through large networks of people.