Humans are social beings. They relate and associate with one another for many and various purposes. To keep bonds of friendship going, people travel several kilometres to visit their relations and friends. Long before the advent of faster and improved means of transportation, people spent days and even months on their journeys.
Today, communication has also improved significantly with information technology explosion. The IT revolution introduced communication applications (apps) that enabled individuals and groups to communicate seamlessly with one another. SM apps stand tall among recent technological innovations. SM is unarguably the fastest way of mobilizing people for any purpose across the globe today!
The new media, otherwise referred to as Social Media has changed (and is changing) the way information is dispatched. With a smart device, almost everyone can create, forward and share anything from the comfort of their corners. Information/disinformation circulation now happens at the click of a button thanks to new media platforms such as WhatsApp, Facebook, twitter etc.
Most Social media applications (apps) enable group interaction. In this part of the world, WhatsApp remains arguably the most active/popular social media tool amongst work mates, school mates, family members and acquaintances. Members of the various categories of people listed above create platforms to serve their purposes. Platforms are created for sermons, for fun, for acquaintanceship and dating, for educational purposes, and for family union/bonding etc. These SM group platforms offer opportunities for identifiable groups to synergize to achieve a common goal.
These platforms are generally guided by rules and regulations to forestall abuses. However, in spite of the rules on most platforms, some individual members still find a way of making life difficult for others by disobeying the rules. The most common offense is forwarding irrelevant and usually long sermons from other sources. Most of these people who go about forwarding useless stuff to platforms hardly read other persons’ posts; all they do is forward anything they find. That is the reason one would find for instance that one would find same messages forwarded by different persons in succession. There are also others who specialize in terrorizing other members of the platforms, cowing them into submission with their absurd views/opinions. The desire for some people to belong to various platforms is so high that some of these people get onto platforms without seeking to know what purpose the particular platform seeks to serve.