What on the internet world is social media?
If you’ve been on the internet during the past few years, you would likely have encountered this term in various contexts, in different websites. And in 2009, you’d probably have heard of or read about it off the internet. CNN, Fox, Sky News and the BBC are just among the biggest names in traditional journalism that have given social media a spot in their broadcast. But few of Facebook’s 300-million strong active users, or Twitter’s 18 million fans could tell you what social media is exactly.That’s not surprising. Today’s hottest buzz has not even made it yet to the Merriam-Webster dictionary.
So, I did a few searches on Google to have a definition we can work with. Here’s the academic-sounding info from Wikipedia:
“Social media is media designed to be disseminated through social interaction, created using highly accessible and scalable publishing techniques. Social media uses Internet and web-based technologies to transform broadcast media monologues (one to many) into social media dialogues (many to many). It supports the democratization of knowledge and information, transforming people from content consumers into content producers. Andreas Kaplan and Michael Haenlein define social media as “a group of Internet-based applications that build on the ideological and technological foundations of Web 2.0, and that allow the creation and exchange of user-generated content”[1]. Businesses also refer to social media as user-generated content (UGC) or consumer-generated media (CGM). Social media utilization is believed to be a driving factor in the idea that the current period in time will be defined as the Attention Age…“
You can read the full-text on Wikipedia here. But let’s proceed and dumb this down in the context of blogging.
From that definition we find three key elements to what defines social media:
1. Media – this means content, that is, text articles, audio or video files
2. Highly accessible techniques – which simply means text or digital files that can be accessed by anyone on the internet,
3. Social Interaction – basically a feedback mechanism between content providers and their audience.
What does that boil down to? It’s just people having conversations using technology available in today’s world. If you want to think about it in old-school setting, it’s not your typical teacher-student relationship in a classroom; it’s more like a group of friends coming together for tea one afternoon to share their new stuffs with each other.
So whether it’s emails, blogs, podcasts, chats, online friend networks, video/slide show streams, virtual worlds, as long as it brings together people from anywhere in the world and gives them a venue to interact with one another, it’s social media.
