Virtual Reality: A WJON Investigation of Social Media in Everyday Life

Back in 2004, when I was a sophomore in college, I became aware of this new craze called Facebook. Seemed like it appeared overnight, and before long, most of the students at my college of 1,800 had a "profile" full of seemingly useless information. It also seemed like a silly and temporary fad, only good for making party plans or secretly stalking attractive classmates.

I predicted it would peter out.

I was way wrong.

Consider these 2011 stats.  Facebook is the second-most visited website after Google. It's got over 500 million users. 1 in 13 people worldwide have an account. Of these, 50% check it once a day or more. 30% percent of users ages 18-34 check their Facebook sites on their smartphones before they even climb out of bed.  The average user spends over 700 minutes a month on Facebook - that's half a day of reading status updates, clicking links, and "liking" the things our friends and family do online.

And Minnesotans? Well, we have a higher than average amount of Facebookers - around 25% of our population is logging in every day.

Facebook's not the only site getting a lot of action. Craigslist, the well known community-oriented digital marketplace, has over 20 billion page views a month, the 10th most viewed website in the US. Twitter, the mass text messaging service, has 200 million users as of 2011.

So, what do we like so much about social media? No one can deny that it has done SOME good things:

But, it's not ALL good:

Whatever your opinion on social media, it's undeniably powerful and looks like it's here to stay. I'll admit it - I'm a Facebook addict. I've got my own social media stories. Some good and some, well, not so good.

Never mind all that. I want to know what YOU think.  How do you feel about social media? Is Facebook (or some other social media service) a big part of YOUR life? Got a story you'd like to share? Leave a comment here, or on OUR Facebook page!

And of course, feel free to share the link to this story on your own Facebook page.

I'd definitely "Like" that.