The Positives of Social Media: Spread of Information

Show of hands for those of us ever jolted awake at midnight by the Amber alert feature you didn’t know you had on your iPhone. Do you remember how missing children used to be advertised? Milk cartons. Printouts at a police station or local businesses. Now it comes directly to our smartphones as a push notification. I saw a Facebook post a few weeks ago about a high school girl, Jessica, who went missing after school. She went missing at, maybe, 4pm. By 10pm, the post about her disappearance had been shared 7,459 times. That number isn’t individuals who saw the post, but networks of individuals. I’ve seen a wide…