Importance of social media and its influence on the direction of social response and social policy.

 Importance of social media and its influence on the direction of social response and social policy.

Social media has become ubiquitous and envisaged as being fundamental in 21^st-century society. While the use of social media in education has been the subject of recent research, Social media remains to be an untapped source of information to catalyze policy action and social change. However, social media platform diversity, including the available techniques for analysis, presents numerous ways to offer insights for social policy making and decision making. Accordingly, an analysis of the importance of social media and its influence on social response and social change is of the essence.

Social media usage enables civic engagement and reinforces outreach efforts among individuals, thereby fostering effective advocacy for change and realization of the goals of social change. Effective advocacy upsurges the ability of individuals to make organizations respond to human needs and influence public policy. It is through the use of social media such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram that awareness of change can be effected to reach a broad audience in real-time and enable feedback loops to meet the goals of change within the stipulated time.

Social media supports outreach efforts by spreading information regarding the causes, enhancing interaction and relationships among people, and enhancing collective action through collaboration, and in doing so, it augments advocacy for change. The social change policy emphasizes collaborative efforts across various social sectors and demography. Social media is highly communal, and at the same time, it is individualistic and is useful in change advocacy, especially when examining behaviors and attitudes of different people regarding a change policy. Besides, social media posting such as Facebook posts are spontaneous and frequent and therefore helps in collecting a large amount of information within a short time. Thus, social media serves as a useful tool in social advocacy, which can be used to attain collective information that might not have been available. Therefore, social media is a novel to facilitate social interaction and collaboration to achieve social advocacy. However, the disadvantage of social media usage in advocacy is that it fosters superficiality since social media users take part in multitasking and end up not paying enough attention to task completion. The constant connection to digital devices facilitates digital distraction at the level of engagement.

Accordingly, social media influences the direction of social response and policy. The emergent of e-petitions, for instance, allows the public to sign petitions aimed at facilitating social change. The petitions gain a large number of social responses in comparison to the traditional way of crowdsourcing for purposes of social policy changes involving signature collection. An online petition is a critical online participation activity that is designed to allow the general public to influence decision making. Currently, e-petitions have been employed in the political system across the globe through the use of twitter to increase political participation among the people, thereby facilitating social response and, to a greater extend, effecting social policy changes. The role of e-petitions in social policy and social response cannot be underestimated. In a bid to advocate for environmental change, I signed an online petition using twitter and within the first days. However, what motivated me most to sign the petition was that it was easily accessible online, and it did not take a lot of my time; otherwise I do not think I would have considered signing the petition. When social information is provided in real-time and in a transparent way as facilitated by social media, then this would have a more significant impact on the social policy. Accordingly, presenting information in bulk, such as million signatures in e-petitions, encourages higher social response.

Notably, live streaming across various social media platforms offers a direct and personal connection to each person.  Live streaming using the various social media platforms has deemed to be a powerful tool in influencing the direction of social response. For instance, it is easy to gain an understanding of the attitudes and behaviors of people concerning a policy through live streaming. For instance, Hong Kong’s recent shocking and gruesome protest has been watched through live streaming, and without social media, these protests would not have been known or even viewed. Generally, live streaming keeps people and the community at large to be informed by presenting them with up to date information based on societal happening.

The #MeTo movement is a typical social media movement I would want to see as it has dramatically impacted social change across the globe.  The movement encouraged the use of twitter hashtag in which social media users in the #MeTo movement made use of it expressing the message hashtag you are not alone, and I was too a victim of sexual harassment. This, therefore, helped much in advocacy and social policy change towards stopping sexual harassment and achieve collective action.

Social media is increasingly pertinent to social change. While it plays a significant role in advocacy for change through the facilitation of civic engagement, strengthening outreach efforts, enhancing social interaction, and collaboration for social action, it possesses limitations through fostering superficiality and distraction. Nevertheless, it influences social response and social policy evident in the use of e-petitions and live stream of videos.