With 750 million Facebook users, 200 million Tweeters and around 500,000 videos uploaded to Youtube everyday the potential to spread valuable news and opinions is at it's greatest. But is this potential being wasted? The drive behind tweeting is slowly focusing itself around the opinions of celebrities and what's on peoples mind is gradually becoming worthless information to fill up the time.
In 2009, users of twitter were given a first look at a horrific New York plane crash via Twitpic. These effects were displayed 15 minutes before they hit the mainstream news outlets. This is a perfect example of how valuable the 140 character allowance is to spread something worthwhile with the tweeter summing it up with ''I just watched a plain crash in Hudson''.
But Twitter is filtering down through the ages of its users and in turn having a drastic effect on its validity as a foundation for breaking news. It's an oppurtunity to edit your life, a one-up manship amongst not only the day to day users like you or me but also the celebrities. With some of its most followed people being Justin Bieber at over 10 million and Katie Price at just over 1 million it seems as though it's now acting as a graph to plot the most powerful celebs on.
But in the same respect, this isn't always bad. Obama, or his people at least, use twitter to build up the relationship between him and his public and accounts such as Daybreak and BBC allow us to recieve the current news on the go but the following count for these users are nothing compared to Bieber's. And out of 50+ million tweets in a day a proportion of them are spam from fans desparate to get a mention from their favourite celebrity so are these sites just setting us up for a fall? Are they exploiting the naive and giving empty speech bubbles to those who don't understand the value of them? Change the way you Social Network, starting now, hashtag SocialNetwasting and change the value of these sites forever.
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