Social media is becoming an increasingly large part of our everyday lives. A day doesn’t go by where I don’t check at least three separate social media sites. I have been interacting with social media since the days of Myspace and I have noticed that many popular social media sites have started offering less ways of expression. Sites like Instagram, Twitter, Vine, Yik Yak and Snapchat each restrict the ways you can communicate with others. How does this occur when a site like Facebook exists?
I believe people around my age were the last to interact with Myspace. I remember Myspace was an open-ended social media website. You could play games (albeit annoying ones at times), post pictures and videos, put up a playlist of all of your favorite songs and personalize your page with microscopic details. Despite this, Myspace was eventually overtaken by Facebook, which at the time offered only a few different features and little personalization. I believe this occurred because we all want just the right amount of freedom when it comes to our social media.
Twitter exemplifies the proliferation of social media restrictiveness perfectly because users are limited to just 140 characters, including spaces. For context, that last sentence has 147 characters. Why then do we decide to restrict ourselves when we have so many other more liberating websites like Facebook, other than the fact that our parents use them? The fact that some people manage to express themselves in 140 characters amazes me. That is likely why many people use it. The challenge of being both eloquent and curt draws people in. The same concept goes for all of these websites. Instagram only offered picture posts with captions until it was bought by Facebook, after which a video feature was added. Posts to Snapchat have a limited amount of time they can be seen and Yik Yak doesn’t even allow names, faces or a named account. Vine only allows six seconds of video and was intended to only use practical effects. These sites may slowly be adding in new features like direct messaging but that is only to keep old users still interested and active without drastically changing their brand.
Comparing social media to art is a bit of a stretch, but bear with me; what makes art beautiful isn’t that it exists, but that it was created by a person with limited materials and abilities. Had Leonardo da Vinci been omnipotent his work would be worthless, but only when you realize that a single man is responsible for his many accomplishments you recognize the value in it. This concept on a smaller scale can be used to understand how new social media sites can still thrive in an environment dominated by a few giant sites that offer more.