The Evolution of Social Media


Lab Reports, Timelines, Visualization

Introduction

Social media has become an integral part of the present generation, with a majority using at least one social media platform regularly. With advances in technology, its’ reach has increased rapidly over the last decade, and appears to be continuing to do so. Social media platforms have facilitated connections between people all around the world, making it possible for users to make new friends, keep in touch with existing ones or even find people that they’ve lost touch with. With these advantages, however, some negative effects have also surfaced, including privacy issues and cybercrime among others. Despite these less than satisfactory aspects of social media, platforms like Facebook and Instagram continue to be used widely. Since most of us have become so used to these platforms in the present day, information regarding what the social media world looked like at the beginning interested me as an individual. I also considered how every social media platform is an intersection between data, technology and design, domains that were to be considered while choosing a topic for this timeline. The timeline created for this assignment displays a series of social media platforms chronologically, starting from the very first one, Six Degrees, all the way up to the present-day Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. 

View the timeline here

Materials

Timeline.js was the tool used to create this timeline. It is a low-code and open-source tool that uses inputs from a linked Google spreadsheet to generate timelines. Information was fed into the spreadsheet along with media that would ideally support the content, including images, videos and soundtracks. The information used for this timeline was mainly sourced from various sites on the internet, and images were sourced from Google images. 

Process

The first step was to look for data that could be added to the timeline. The data that I finally used was not obtained from a single dataset, since I could not find a single source that provided me with all the information I felt was required. The evolution of social media is a topic that has been touched on by many sources, which also meant that sites had information that overlapped with the others for the most part but had differing or additional pieces of information too. I finalized the elements that I would be adding to my timeline by compiling all the data that I was able to get from many different sources. I then chose nine events that I felt would do justice to the topic while not leaving any important information out. I tried to incorporate both popular events as well as events that were not very well known to maintain an element of interest in viewers. I then framed short captions to explain each event. All these elements were added to the Google spreadsheet linked to Timeline.js. Additionally, I decided to add a background color to each frame through the spreadsheet. The initial colors were chosen such that they went from dark shades to light shades as the events became more recent. However, the font color remained white and was not clear enough against a lighter background. I finally decided to go with colors that matched the color of the logo in each frame. All the colors were chosen using Adobe Color. Once the spreadsheet was done, the timeline was generated. 

Results

The timeline generated had a neat and clean appearance, effectively formatting the written content along with images to make the frames readable and aesthetically pleasing. The narration flowed well, with the images supplementing the written content to give an instant description of every frame in the timeline. The navigation buttons on either side were intuitive and easy to understand to view the timeline satisfactorily. Although I was not able to implement my initial idea of using a single color in gradation satisfactorily, the resulting choices of background color gave the timeline more character and related each frame to the social media platform displayed in it on a stronger level. The interactive timeline at the bottom also added to the ease of use and overall appearance of the timeline. 

Reflection

Color: According to the initial idea, shades of gray graduating from dark to light were used to signify the ascending nature of the events on the timeline. This effect took some slight tweaking here and there to achieve the desired color range. However, due to my inability to change the font color accordingly, I had to improvise and ended up choosing colors that matched the logos on each page. Through this process, I was able to work with Adobe Color and discover how to use it effectively. In future, I would like to work a little bit more on customizing some aspects of the timeline to my liking using code. 

Content: Finalizing the content that I could add to the timeline was a difficult task, since there were many events to choose from but only a limited number of events that could be added. This required analysis of what could be put in and what could be left out, and likely helped the content to be more precise and relevant. Supporting media was easy to find since all elements in the timeline were popularly known social media platforms, and their logos provided the information necessary to know what was in the frame without reading it. However, captioning was slightly difficult to do due to my inexperience with writing them. Packing all required information into a few short sentences was a task that I feel that I need to learn more about, to make sure that my captions are good in terms of both the information they convey and their understandability.  

In terms of Timeline.js itself, it was a wonderful tool that produced great results with minimum effort on the user’s part. However, along with its’ ease of use it also seemed to be harder to make customizations, especially in my case given that I am not very experienced with coding. 

In the future, I would like to learn how to customize my timelines more. The color aspect of this assignment was where I had the most trouble settling on a final look, which I feel can be remedied by further research on color itself and exploration of this tool. Overall, Timeline.js was fun and easy to work with, and I would like to continue to use it with more expertise in the long run.