Divya Pathak
With the birth of the internet in the year 1983, humanity was just fourteen years away from having its first ever social networking site being launched in 1997. SixDegrees.com allowed people to create a profile page, create lists of connections, and send messages within the networks. Once this was out, developers got creative and then came Hot or Not (2000), Friendster (2002), MySpace (2003), and finally Facebook, YouTube, Reddit and LinkedIn in and around 2004. All these platforms had one thing in common – giving its users the ability to post pictures/videos of themselves and connect with people around the globe. Further down the timeline, we had Instagram and Snapchat with their filters and TikTok in 2016 with its sole purpose of hosting short videos put up by its users.
With increasing access to social media, and more and more people creating content and putting it up for people to view, YouTube in 2017 established partnerships with content creators, encouraging people to provide content on YouTube, and share advertisers’ profits. This encouraged people to take up content creation as a career, and today it is considered as one of the many mainstream career paths taken up by millennials and gen Zs.
Today, with its numerous new features, social media has become an enormous platform for artists around the globe to share their art with audiences from every corner of the world and make a living out of it. With artists increasing their reach around the world on social media, they are also able to collaborate with others and explore their creativity beyond the bounds of geography. At the beginning of the pandemic in 2020, when the entire world had shut down, artists all around the world leveraged this global platform and continued to perform in front of the whole world, collaborating with one another, and spreading positive vibes to help people get through the difficult times. This also encouraged spectators to explore their latent talents, which led to a new generation of content creators being born, with their dance trends and food trends going viral over the internet.
Today, social media plays a huge role in inspiring people to take up the arts, ranging from the performing arts and photography to cooking, writing or just simple aesthetic videos. These hobbies then sometimes turn into careers when people get much deserved recognition and find happiness in the arts. Social media has had a great influence over human lives, both positive and negative. However, one cannot leave out the role it has played in bringing out some of the best artists, and thus, influencing those ex-musicians and dancers and artists to put on their creative hats again and create something new! Social media truly is the world’s greatest stage.
