Social Media use worldwide

This week my graduate school instructor invited us in the Discussion Board to research and post findings about social media use worldwide. We're fortunate as an online program to have classmates from around the world with the majority of our international students residing in Asia. We have students from Europe, and military members stationed worldwide, as well. I love this about our program and it speaks to its reputation.

The more I write this blog and will continue to grow it by linking it to my LinkedIn account, the more I will stay connected to my classmates in this program. I think there's a benefit of having these alumni relationships in addition to sharing our career development. Even though I only used LinkedIn as my sole social media account prior to this summer's graduate class in Web 2.0 learning, I'm already planning on being an active LinkedIn user and will share content and articles. I'm otherwise private about sharing on social media.

I visited Beijing, China in 2012 and was surprised how prevalent phones were. I explored tourist areas, the business district, and average districts where I saw everyone with a phone. So, for this week's assignment I investigated statistics on phone and social media usage in China. It's on the higher end worldwide with 73% of individuals owning a phone. Being that it's a huge country with a big rural population it makes sense that so many people would gravitate toward phones to stay connected. In addition, social media is a natural for these same reasons. China bans Western social media and instead has their own versions of Twitter, TikTok, FaceBook, Instagram and just about every social media app in the Western world. Even though it's censored, they have 513 million users.

It will be interesting to see if their government harnesses the power of social media to deliver online learning. The sheer number of users makes this an appealing prospect.

References

Kemp, S. (2023). Digital 2023: China. Digital Reportal. https://datareportal.com/reports/digital-2023-china#:~:text=There%20were%201.05%20billion%20internet,percent%20of%20the%20total%20population.

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