Essay On Social Media

Social media plays a significant role in the world we are living today solely because we all depend on it for information and communication to conduct our businesses. The need to keep in touch with friends, families, and colleagues has made social networking to advance. The need to gossip led to the invention of language that helped the early man to carry out social activities such as hunting together. We have now entered a new era where people are using social media to interact with other users who have the same interest as them. The paper will provide an insight into the cause and effect of the social networking through grooming, relationship through gossip and the new form of social networking.
Social networking is phenomena that emerged due to various scenarios that emerged from long time ago before the human memory. Therefore, factors that can be associated with the emergence of the social networking includes the behavior of the human animal in the earliest ancestral environment (Flachmann and Flachmann 347). In order to spread gossips, human animal used grooming as a way of communication. For instance chimpanzee and baboons spent 20 percent of their time grooming, which was an ancient form of social networking. According to Flachmann and Flachmann grooming, can be considered as the first social networking. This is because it “was a way to establish and maintain friendships, determine the hierarchy within the tribe and signal one’s social connection to another tribe members" (347). However, in the contemporary world, the social networking has taken another from but still maintains the ancient traits.
After civilization, people started to use social networks with a sole purpose of communicating and interacting with each other in order to expand their social relationships. Social media such as televisions, internet, and radios have made people embrace other people’s culture as well as their way of living. However, the emergence of the modern social networking comes along with the increase of the primitive gossips. Through the social networking, people can spread gossips faster. According to Flachmann and Flachmann, the social networking has professionally produced gossip which is as available as the fast food, and people are overdosing on that. Since the development of the SixDegrees.com people can create a list of friends, and profile to foster relationship (Boyd and Ellison 214). However, the exceptional ability to develop a natural relationship through the “efficient gossip engine,” is an old-age attraction that was allied in the ancestral environment (Flachmann and Flachmann 348).
However, it can be observed that the social networking has something new compared to the ancient network. The Human has created a larger social networking than the social networks that were present in the ancestral environment. From the 50 members of the chimpanzee and baboon groups in the old age, the groups such as friends on the Facebook has significantly increased. For instance, one can have a 1000 or so Facebook friends. Organizations are also getting larger, “but as they do they change character: bureaucracies, levels of authority, social stratification begin to emerge” (Flachmann and Flachmann 348). These were elements that were not present at the beginning of the social networking.
In conclusion, it is, therefore, important to first take time and think what impact the post we make on social networking site has in the society. We should take precaution and network safely in all circumstances. Certain factors such as grooming, relationship through gossip and the professional gossiping has facilitated that advancement of the social networking.

Works Cited

Ellison, N. B. (2007). Social network sites: Definition, history, and scholarship. Journal of Computer‐Mediated Communication, 13(1), 210-230.
Flachmann, Kim, and Michael Flachmann. Nexus: A Rhetorical Reader for Writers. 2nd ed. Pearson Education, 2014. Print.
Rogers, Michael. "What Evolutionary Psychology Says About Social Networking - Technology & Science - Innovation - The Practical Futurist." Msnbc.com. NBC News, 9 Oct. 2007. Web. 14 Apr. 2015. <http://www.nbcnews.com/id/20642550/ns/technology_and_science-innovation/t/how-social-can-we-get/#.VSyKVZOLGlo>.