Computer science has very little to do with learning how to use apps. What you are saying is kinda like saying you want to learn how to be a mechanic so that you can learn how to drive a car. Driving skills and mechanic skills both relate to cars, but they aren’t otherwise related.
Similarly, computer science is more of an “under the hood” type of thing as far as computer apps are concerned. It’s not really what you want to learn if you want to get proficient in social media apps.
Telecommunications could probably help you somewhat, but that’s a very broad field and you have a fairly narrow scope of interest.
I would not characterize a lack of learning in these fields as a “huge mistake” given your particular interests.
The best way to learn things like this is just to do it. As was already mentioned, your local community college will probably have some courses that can help.
Rather than use the nebulous term “mastering” why don’t you tell us some specifics about what you want to do and why you want to do it? It’ll be much easier to answer your questions with concrete examples. I suspect your needs are rather modest and easy to achieve.
Like any field, building the original Apple was something one person could do from scratch, and then program much of the very basic interface to make it work. Similarly, Bill gates allegedly wrote a version of BASIC that fit in 4K - on paper, then hard coded it onto paper tape by hand… and it ran first time. As time goes on things get more complex, requiring more manpower and detail knowledge than one person can master. The Wrights, IIRC, built their own aircraft gasoline engines. To build a modern, efficient internal combustion engine would be far beyond the capability of a talented home mechanic.
So with computers and media - database theory vs. networking vs. programming are all separate disciplines with enough detail to suck you into a particular rabbit hole full time. Same with video edit, graphic design, effective written communication, how to integrate each of these into internet web presentation… you can be pretty good at several or a deep expert at one, but odds are you don’t have the time to do it all. Pick what you want and specialize.
Computer Science will help you build or modify an app, but it won’t teach you what to do with the app once you have it.
Communications will tell you how to use the app in your daily life, but the only technical knowledge you’ll gain is “start the app.”
Think of it this way - a cooking course will teach you how make delicious pastries. It will not teach you that a constant diet of pastries is a poor way to eat.
You’re mixing up a few branches of study/careers here.
Using social media tools is part of a ‘digital marketing’ field. By webpage building tools, do you mean actually building websites (that would be a programmer/developer who has studied computer science), or having the ability to put content together using a CMS (that would be a digital marketer again).
‘Mastering programmes’ is a vague notion. So it’s either
(a) do you want to build websites - then train as a programmer, or
(b) do you want to use digital tools to communicate most effectively, then you want to study marketing.
No, it wasn’t. That would be true if one of the Steves designed and fabricated every chip in the computer himself instead of dropping in a 6502 (amongst other chips designed and built by teams of other people.)
When I studied CS in college you could cover just about everything. Kind of like the old joke about the kid who says his parents had it easy studying history since there was so much less of it when they were kids.
However I knew skilled microprocessor designers who seemed to have never seen a UNIX command prompt before I showed them. Forget about shell. It seemed that only computer engineering people knew decent amounts at both. Or at least the ones I hired did.
A lot of social media is more marketing then CS. My daughter teaches some of them in her marketing classes. If you look at who uses Facebook etc. in a company, it is the marketing department not the IT department.
It is much easier to watch YouTube videos about how to use programs than to try and guess what goes on under the hood. And when you learn one interface others are easier. I picked up Zoom really fast thanks to having used WebEx.
OP, is it easier for you to learn from videos than from books? That’s the way I would go, since screens in books never show dynamically what happens, and often get out of date by the time you read the book.
Yeah, most of that is going to be under the umbrella of “continuing education” type programs, not academic study.
Computer science or engineering are more about how to actually design and build those sorts of applications, not about how to use them.
Lots of social media corporate use is under the auspices of the marketing or corporate communications/PR departments, and is still probably significantly governed by rule-of-thumb, and/or paying attention to someone who’s good at it. I sort of doubt that there are a lot of useful degrees or even courses in social media marketing in an academic sense. Right now, it seems to be governed by commercial training programs and the odd university business program certification. Even at that, it’s not about using the tools, it’s about how to create and manage an online marketing campaign.
This is the best advice my IT whiz child ever gave me. For years I was too timid, until I wanted to learn message boarding on daDope and then I dabbled my toes in and that turned out to be very good advice…and look at me now!
Yeah, this was kind of what I was thinking (depending on what the OP means by “internet communications”).
User Experience (UX) is really the interactions between the human and the the web site. Really a component of application / web site design. It takes into account stuff like “how does the user find what they are looking for” and “how do we make it easy for them to buy/sell/otherwise conduct transactions on the site”.
Digital Marketing, broadly speaking, is how to use social media, web, and other platforms to share content and build your brand.
There is also an extensive Analytics / Data Science component. Gathering data and KPIs to assess the effectiveness of various marketing campaigns or to predict customer behavior.
Or if you are simply creating content, that could be Communications, Design or some other creative field.