The Social Website: How Did They Change the Cultural Landscape?

Published On 2011-04-20 18:30:00

The evolution of the Internet is currently at a stage where it is consistently drawing in more and more people, and the vehicle that is leading this is the social website.

Social websites have had a major impact on the cultural landscape of the world. This impact is truly staggering because it has happened in an extremely short time span.

The phenomenon of the social website is a direct result of two things, the tendency of a person to try to find out everything about everyone and the counter tendency to not share everything with everyone.

While social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter have allowed a person to indulge in such tendencies, they have also gradually had an impact on the way the same person sees the people around him or her; this impact can be seen in both a negative as well as positive light.

The direct result of this is nothing short of a major shift in the cultural landscape of the world. Consider the following facts and subsequent extrapolations from the most famous social networking website of them all; Facebook.

An average person can interact with more than 900 million objects

Psychologists, over the years, have suggested that a person is a sum of all the happenings in his or her life. This means that every little stimulant that a person goes through with while growing up has an impact on how he or she thinks and acts in life.

Facebook gives people a chance to interact with over 900 million objects; even if a person interacts with just two in a single day, then it would play a role in his thought process. It must be noted that objects here refer to pages, groups, events and community pages.

In fact, an average Facebook user is connected to a staggering 80 community pages, groups and events which may or may not be a result of a common man trying to create a website.

Effectively, what this means on the ground is that a person on Facebook is perpetually being influenced from a variety of directions. Influence does not mean that this person will suddenly change his viewpoint or religion; rather it means that Facebook allows people to develop a greater understanding of strange and unknown concepts and cultures.

There are 500 million active users of Facebook, of which 250 million log in every day

The opening up of new vistas with regard to greater social, cultural and regional understanding is accepted and appreciated by around 50 per cent of Facebook’s active users.

This can be seen by the fact that around 250 million active Facebook users log in every day while the total number of active Facebook users is around 500 million.

What this piece of information shows is that at least 250 million users approve of the kind of information being provided by Facebook, whether it is in the form of status updates from friends, pages, groups or even applications. Furthermore, once you realise that the number 250 million is for everyday users and not every second day, then you begin to see the true impact of social networking on people.

Over 2.5 million websites have integrated with Facebook

The above mentioned numbers are exactly why a person who has used the website builder to build a website always tries to incorporate Facebook plug-ins.

For example, if you make a website or create website portals, it is likely that you will want to integrate Facebook because this will allow you access to so many Internet users.

Therefore, the marketing, economic and the business aspect of life has also been drastically changed by the existence of social networking websites like Facebook.

Intangible influences of social websites

Unhindered flow of information is something that has to be attributed to social websites, because before their arrival and dominance the Internet was in control of website owners and not the masses.

A prime example of this was seen in the way Egypt’s revolution took place. The nation went through a revolution purely on the back of protestors using social websites to not only organise rallies and get-togethers but to also garner support from the masses.

This happened despite the fact that the government tried to prevent its population from gaining access to the social website, which goes to show the kind of cultural and social freedom that these websites can offer.

As is evident from the statistical information provided above, the social, cultural and even financial impact of social websites cannot be undermined by any kind of counterarguments like less personal physical interaction.