Heard of HONY?

HONY.... Humans of New york. I'm not sure how many of you know about Brandon Stanton, but if you ever google "famous people on social media, you'll probably see his name on the "Top 10" list.

Brandon Stanton, is an american blogger, author, and photographer who has been lost among the stories of strangers that he captured through his lenses. He gave life to those ordinary people he saw on street and that inspired the world.

“Humans of New York began as a photography project in 2010. The initial goal was to photograph 10,000 New Yorkers on the street, and create an exhaustive catalogue of the city’s inhabitants."

This photographer has travelled the world taking portraits of people and sharing their stories with millions of people online. Along with this, his social contributions must be highlighted too.

(source:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandon_Stanton)

His Humans of New York book was published in October 2013. It received good reviews and sold 30,000 copies as preorders.The book reached the number 1 position on The New York Times Non-Fiction Best Sellers of 2013 for the week beginning November 3, 2013.The book remained on the list for 26 weeks, again reaching the number one position on December 21, 2014.

Stanton visits President Barack Obama at the White House on February 5, 2015

In December 2013, Stanton was named one of Time's "30 Under 30 People Changing The World." In August 2014, Stanton traveled to the Middle East to photograph people as part of a 50-day trip through 10 countries in the region under the auspices of the United Nations. In July 2015 he traveled to Pakistan and again to Iran to do the same. At the conclusion of his trip to Pakistan, Stanton crowd funded $2.3 million to help end bonded labor in Pakistan.

In January 2015, Stanton was invited to the Oval Office to interview President Barack Obama. The trip concluded a two-week crowd-funding campaign on Humans of New York in which $1.4 million was raised.

In March 2016, Stanton opposed Donald Trump's presidential campaign, criticizing Trump on social media for hateful speech, such as delayed disavowing "white supremacy" and defending those who commit violence at his rallies. A day after his Facebook post, it had over 1.6 million likes and was shared nearly 1 million times.

Stanton has posted stories and photos from the Pediatrics Department of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City. As he did for his other projects, Stanton created a fundraising campaign, and raised over $3.8 million for pediatric cancer research.

He is a Live example of how social media could be put to use to make a positive impact, how it is important to use our resources to help a million people out there, and how simplicity brings more love and attention than what most people put up there. We often tend to see many influencers that try to portray a lifestyle of fantasy to their audience and their contents create a lot of preasure among the people, competing against the unrealistic virtual life. Most often, teanagers tend to blindly follow the unrealistic lifestyle and entertainment they see on social media and this often leads to voracious consumption of the "internet product". So it is important to educate the users of its positive and negative uses, and in my opinion, it must begin with the most popular social media users. With their help, many lives can change.

By Hamna Iqbal