9781422273906

immediate way for users to compare their possessions, vacations, bodies, and lifestyles with other users. Snapchat. A multimedia platform that was released in 2011, Snapchat was originally used for audiovisual communication between specific users—you could send someone a “snap” that would disappear after no more than ten seconds. These days, the ten-second limit has been removed, and Snapchat is more of a typical social media site where users can follow one another’s posts. (When Instagram released their Stories function, critics complained that the company had essentially just incorporated Snapchat into its own service.) Twitter. A “microblogging” platform, Twitter was founded in 2006. At first, users were limited to only 140 characters per post. This limit was raised to 280 in fall 2017. A central feature of the site is the “retweet,” where people can share other users’ tweets and comment on (or, frequently, mock) them. Twitter has a far smaller user base than either Facebook or Instagram, but it tends to have an outsized cultural influence, in part due to the number of celebrities and social commentators who use it. Political talk is very popular on Twitter—the app was the primary form of communication by former President Donald Trump—and users often turn to the site for breaking news and commentary. Tweets about TV shows, films, and sports events also take up a lot of bandwidth on the site. WhatsApp. Both a VoIP app and social media platform, WhatsApp enables voice and video calls, text messages, and group chats. It also lets users share images and documents. WhatsApp connects users to everyone in their contacts’ lists who uses the app, and it also suggests new contacts.

Social Media Basics

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