Being a student at BSGE means a busy schedule and no social life on school days. Each day often consists of waking up early to finish homework from the previous night, going to school, and staying up late to make an attempt at completing the homework due the next day. Students follow this routine from Monday to Friday and might even spill into the weekend. After all that work, students do need to relax, and they do this through social networking.
Facebook is the most popular social network that currently exists in the world. Approximately, there are 1,310,000,000 active users on Facebook. Facebook is an easy way to interact with family members, and for the students, their friends. A Facebook user can post basically anything including what he or she is doing at any moment to pictures of where the user is or what the person is eating. The Facebook mobile app makes the website portable for quick and easy posts.
Karen Yeung ’18 said she likes Facebook more than other social networks because “you can actually talk to people rather than just comment and post stuff”. The only disadvantage to using Facebook was a recent hacking issue in which Facebook users’ personal information was passed on to hackers. If you are a person of many words and pictures, then Facebook is the best social network for you. If you don’t really like posting things for your friends to see but you do like posting things about trending topics, Twitter may be the best social network for you.
Twitter is another common social network among the 8th, 10th and 12th graders. Twitter is used to post “tweets” — a word, short phrase, or statement — about what the user is thinking. The hashtag (#) is the most commonly used and known symbol on Twitter. It is used to group your tweet with other tweets that are talking about the same or a similar topic. The @ sign is used to tag other Twitter users in tweets. When you tag someone, the person is notified that they were mentioned in a tweet. On Twitter, you can also retweet, favorite, and comment on other tweets. Twitter also has an app to make posting tweets a lot easier.
Ashlee Chin ’18 thinks of Twitter as “just another social networking site where you can just follow your friends and post status about your life”. Twitter can be a bit annoying to some because of the character limit, not being able to post videos, and only single-picture posts. Twitter has a 140-character limit to each tweet, so if you are a person of many words, Twitter may not be the best social network for you. Another disadvantage is that Twitter still does not allow users to directly post videos in tweets. You may post vines (six second videos recorded using an app called “Vine”) directly into tweets, but of course, vines are a lot shorter than your average video.
To post a video, you must post the actual link to the video for others to be redirected to. The same is true for Instagram and Facebook posts. They cannot be put directly into a tweet, so you must copy and paste the post’s link into the tweet. The last major disadvantage of using Twitter is being allowed to post only one picture per tweet. Multiple pictures aren’t allowed, so if you have a lot of pictures to post you would have to post multiple tweets with one picture in each of them. If you are one to take and post many pictures, Instagram may be the best social network for you.
Instagram is a social network that allows users to post pictures with filters and borders. One main advantage of using Instagram is being allowed to post any picture with any caption. On social networks such as Facebook and Twitter, it is easy to find the most random and idiotic posts. Some people may find these posts hilarious while others may just find it plain annoying. On Instagram, you could just enjoy looking at other users’ pictures. Arpita Nag ’18 finds Instagram unnecessary because “you could just use Photoshop”. Of course, there are going to be those people who post selfies or pictures with irrelevant captions 24/7, but those are the risks that come with making an Instagram account.
So which one is the “best” social network? Even if Facebook is the most popular out of the three, the “best” social network is up to the user. Each person has their own likes and may not like a social network over the other for their own reasons. So, in its own way, each social network is the “best” for someone.
The BACC Rag 