MAC 317- Social Media and Its Impact

Social Media Definition

Social media has been analysed and investigated from a variety of disciplines and perspectives, thus generating different definitions of social media. Table 1 provides a list of the most important ones according to different disciplines. The emergence of new and social media is quite a recent phenomenon and became popularised only when the Internet became ubiquitous and accessible to consumers worldwide, giving rise to the so-called Network Society (Castells 2003). This shift implies a move from traditional communication and media theory (McLuhan 1962, 1964; McQuail 1983, 1997; Lazarsfeld and Katz 1955), even if new media didn’t replace older media but converged with other media sources (Lievrouw and Livingstone 2002).

Today, in fact, as argued by Bolter and Grusin (1999), media are undergoing a process of “remediation” in which older media are continuously appropriated, reconstructed or absorbed by the new media, therefore simultaneously shaping future media and older ones (Bolter and Grusin 1999). The Social Web is able to combine in novel ways, remediate and expand communication and information possibilities that were already present in the past. Through social communication tools users are contributing content to new-media aggregators and big digital platforms such as Facebook, Amazon, Google, and eBay. Blogs, or other platforms specifically designed for user-generated content, represent a social infrastructure that can harness people's social cooperation. People’s relationships and digital identities become publicly displayed, forming a social graph that exposes each user's connections and lists of friends and contacts. In this research, social media is defined as “mass-self communication” (Castells 2010), i.e. the mass, meaning the “massive” amount of knowledge produced and in its production by the non-expert “masses”; and the production of knowledge that utilises the capabilities of large numbers of users for the solution and prediction of challenges or problems. And “self” because the communication happens intersubjectively among users themselves who can broadcast news or an update to their friends and to a potential mass audience. The Internet is considered as an enabling infrastructure for novel ways to organize collective action via communication technologies (Rheingold 2002). 16 Mass-self communication runs on horizontal networks of interactive communication, engaging users that “live with the Internet”, turning the Internet in the communication fabric of people's daily lives, for work, for personal connection, for social networking, for information, for entertainment, for politics and so on. According to Castells (2009), mass self-communication represents the contemporary evolution of the Web due to fast and mobile broadband diffusion, open-source software development and applications, advanced users' interfaces and experiences. Social media is defined in the literature as the term for the ways people connect to people through computation (Lenhart et al. 2010). Users can generate their personal profile, which includes personal information such as location, gender, age, activities and interests, beliefs, affiliations, and other multimedia content about users' personal and professional lives. On the academic side, a considerable body of knowledge has addressed the definition, formation and evolution of social media, often using slightly different terminology to capture the nuances within a diverse digital media ecosystem. The use of the term “social media” emphasizes the ability of users to participate and contribute to content creation, Social media have enabled the emergence of a new participatory digital sphere based on a many-to-many communication where users can dialogically interact and collaborate to the creation of content shaping the flow of communication (Jenkins, 2006). The use of the term "Social networking sites" emphasizes the relational and sharing aspect of the medium and can be defined as "a network of social interactions and personal relationships". Social media can therefore become simultaneously as “social networking sites” as: (1) A tool to support people’s real social networks (organization and extension), and (2) A tool to analyse social identity of the others (description and definition) (Riva 2010). In particular, “social network sites” refer to “web-based services that allow individuals to (1) construct a public or semi-public profile within a bounded system, (2) articulate a list of users with whom they share a connection, and (3) view and traverse their list of connections and those made by others within the system” (Boyd and Ellison 2007, p. 1). The term Social Networking Site (SNS) indicates a platform (including Facebook and YouTube, thematic social networks, blogs, wikis, online forums, virtual communities, online games and virtual worlds) that provides a range of social media services such as user-generated content sharing, social networking, knowledge co-creation and collaborative activities (Hitwise and Experian 2010).