Long gone are the days when parents simply had to get their heads around ‘The Facebook.’ Teenagers now seem to split their activity between a myriad of social networking sites and apps; 15 of which now have over 100 million users. Most parents have just about worked out that LOL means ‘laugh out loud’ rather than ‘lots of love’, but it isn’t always easy to keep up. So here’s how to tell the difference between ‘what’s up’ and ‘whatsapp’; and hopefully your first step towards becoming a touch-typing, hash-tagging, selfie-taking social media fiend. (Photo credit: Nominalize, Pixabay)
A micro-blogging site that allows users to post brief, 140-character messages, and ‘follow’ other user’s activities. It can be used productively, such as for following breaking news and live updates, but mostly regresses into celebrity stalking and finding out what your friends had for breakfast.
YouTube
A video-sharing website, and the second largest search engine after Google. Over 6 billion hours of video are watched each month on YouTube – that’s almost an hour for every person on Earth. In case that wasn’t mind-boggling enough, over 60 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute, and, in 2011, it had over a trillion views.
Snapchat
A mobile app that enables users to put a time limit on the pictures and videos that they send before they disappear, so that they can share fun, light-hearted moments without the risk of having them go public. This inevitably leads to lots of embarrassing ‘selfies’ (self-portraits), including this one from Mr. Cameron:
Whatsapp
Another mobile app that lets users send text messages, audio messages, videos and photos to one or many people with no message limits or fees (as it works over the internet rather than your phone network); so as you can imagine is a huge hit internationally. To give you a scale of its success, Facebook recently acquired the company for over 20 billion US dollars, and it boasts over 600 million users globally.
A platform through which users snap, edit, and share photos either publicly or to followers. It confines photos to a square shape, giving them a ‘vintage’, Kodak polaroid feel; and there are hundreds of filters and effects to choose from, so even the most amateur photographer can make their shots look high-quality and artistic.
Tumblr
More than just a blogging site, Tumblr is, in effect, a streaming scrapbook of text, photos, videos, memes and audio clips. Tumblr currently hosts over 200 million blogs, and so the variety of stuff you can find out there really is limitless – from cooking channels to photography exhibitions to more trivial blogs such as photos from Downing Street captioned with ‘Mean Girls’ quotes.
Vine
A video-sharing site that lets users post and watch looping six-second video clips. Whilst there are a lot of silly videos out there, it also has some interesting journalistic purposes, and has been used to report on stories from the riots in Ferguson and the Scottish referendum to student protests in London. Your teenagers are probably watching fail compilations though.
Pinterest
A ‘pinboard-style’ platform where users can collect their favourite images and categorize them on their own boards using a plethora of criteria: similar characteristics, a theme, birthday parties, holiday ideas, writing a book, interior decorating, or food and drink. It is also proof of the increasing popularity of visual content.
Despite your new found tech savviness, never be afraid to keep things a little old school:
Written by Kristina Murkett
A MyTutor English Tutor