Social Trumps All

I recently visited a new site I had never been to before, www.alexa.com. This site ranks the top sites in the world according to specific data. Combing through the massive amounts of information I scrolled through the top vistited sites online in the United States. I am not sure what was more surprising: the fact that most of the sites I saw were mostly social networking sites, or that Wal-Mart, the number one retailer in the United States, came in at a pathetic 44.

The top ten sites were probably what you and I would both expect. Google ranked number one, reaching a far higher popularity than any other site. But Yahoo! came in above Facebook with Youtube following closely behind. Of course, it should come as no surprise that sites like Facebook and Youtube are among the top visited sites in the United States, but it is somewhat of an awakening that we prefer to read-up on what our friends from high school are doing or watch an amateur video online than visit a news site. CNN did not even make the top ten sites; instead it came in 17, not exactly a close fourth after Youtube.

I find it fascinating to visit a site and look up the statistics of what the rest of the world frequents on the internet. But why has social media and social sites become so popular? Is it really that appealing to "tweet" or "facebook" people whom you may have never met, or follow celebrity updates, as boring as they may be? Could the 140 character status bar Twitter has developed really become a source of news for some people?

As a college student in the middle of all of this buzz and hype surrounding social media, these numbers on www.alexa.com aren't a shock to me. But evolution of where we get our information on a daily basis, however, is. As a nation, and a world, we will visit Google or Twitter or Facebook hours before we will open a news story.

A search through India and England's top sites showed similar results to the United States. We are becoming a globalized world, connected by the touch of a keyboard to anyone in the world. The only thing I have to wonder is how impersonal we have become and where we could be headed. What matters to us shows in how we search the internet and what sites we frequent. Whether all this hype and popularity with social media can be a good thing in the long run has yet to be seen. I certainly can relate to the billions visiting these sites every day.

Take a look at www.alexa.com and explore for yourself the fascinating trend social media has taken in our world.