"Do you have Facebook?"
"Yes, of course. But I don't think you can find me, as there are too many habitancy who have the same name as me. Try searching with my surname as well."
"Hey, you paramount your birthday in K-Box, right? I saw the photos in your Facebook."
"Bro, I saw your comments about the YouTube video that I've posted in my blog. I'm happy that you are also deeply moved by the 'Dancing Peacock Man' as well."
Social media or "social networking" has practically come to be part of our daily lives and being tossed colse to over the past few years. It is like any other media such as newspaper, radio and television but it is far more than just about sharing information and ideas. Public networking tools like Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and Blogs have facilitated creation and replacement of ideas so speedily and widely than the conventional media. The power of define and control a brand is shifting from corporations and institutions to individuals and communities. It is no longer on the 5Cs (e.g. Condominium, credit cards and car) that Singaporeans once talked about. Today, it is about the brand new Cs: creativity, communication, connection, creation (of new ideas and products), society (of shared interests), collaboration and (changing the game of) competition.
Tv Knife Set
In January 2010, InSites Consulting has conducted an online scrutinize with 2,884 consumers from over 14 countries in the middle of the ages of 18 to 55 years old on Public networking. More than 90% of participants know at least 1 Public networking site and 72% of participants are members of at least 1 Public networking site. On the average, habitancy have about 195 friends and they log in twice a day to Public networking sites. However, 55% of the users cannot entrance their Public network websites at work. In the past, not many adults were able to make more than 500 friends, but with Public media, even a child or teenager can get to know more than 500 habitancy in a few days by just clicking the mouse. Public media has devalued the traditional definition of "friend" where it means trust, support, compatible values, etc. Although we get to know more people, we are not able to build strong bond with all the habitancy whom we met as our ready time is limited. Hence, there is an upcoming Public trend of habitancy with wider Public circles, but weaker ties (people we don't know very well but who provide us with useful information and ideas).
Social media also influences people's buying behaviours. Digital work on Group reported that 91% of the habitancy say consumer reviews are the #1 aid to buying decisions and 87% trust a friend's advice over critic's review. It is thrice more likely to trust peer opinions over advertising for purchasing decisions. 1 word-of-mouth conversation has an impact of 200 Tv ads. With the prevalence use of Public media, there is numerous news connected to it from the most viewed YouTube video on "Armless pianist wins 'China's Got Talent'" to Web-assisted suicide cases (e.g. New Jersey college student who killed himself after video of him in a sexual encounter with an additional one man was posted online). Thus, does Public networking make us good or worse off as a society?
Positive Effects of Public Media
Besides having chance to know a lot of habitancy in a fast and easy way, Public media also helped teenagers who have Public or corporeal mobility restrictions to build and assert relationships with their friends and families. Children who go overseas to study can still stay in meaningful caress with their parents. To a greater extend, there is anecdotal evidence of unavoidable outcomes from these technologies.
In 2008, President-elected Obama won the election through the productive use of Public media to reach millions of audience or voters. The Obama campaign had generated and distributed huge estimate of contents and messages over email, Sms, Public media platforms and their websites. Obama and his campaign team fully understood the fundamental Public need that every person shares - the need of being "who we are". Therefore, the campaign sent the message as "Because It's about You" and chose the right form of media to associate with individuals, call for actions and originate society for a Public movement. They encouraged citizens to share their voices, hold seminar parties in houses and run their own campaign meetings. It truly changed the delivery of political message.
Obama campaign had made 5 million "friends" on more than 15 Public networking sites (3 million friends on Facebook itself) and posted nearly 2,000 YouTube videos which were watched over 80 million times. At its peak, their website, MyBarackObama.com, had 8.5 million monthly visitors and produced 400,000 blog posts. In order to ensure that their contents were found by people, the Obama campaign spent .5 million on Google crusade in October alone, 0,000 on Advertising.com, 7,000 on Facebook in 2008, etc. Currently, Obama's Twitter account has close to 6 million followers.
In 2010, after the earthquake happened in Haiti, many of the lawful communication lines were down. The rest of the world was not able to grasp the full photograph of the situation there. To facilitate the sharing of information and make up for the lack of information, Public media came in very handy to narrative the news about the affected area on what happened and what help was needed. Tweets from many habitancy provided an impressive summary of the ongoing events from the earthquake. Bbc covered the event by combining tweets from the work of its reporter Matthew Price in Port-au-Prince at the ground. Guardian's live blog also used Public media together with the information from other news organisations to narrative about the salvage mission.
It has been two years since Cnn officially launched iReport as a section of its website where habitancy can upload video material, with caress information. During the Haiti crisis, Cnn had published a range of Public media material but not all the materials were verified. The editorial staff would vet the reports from the habitancy journalists and labeled them differently compared to unverified contents. On Facebook, a group, named "Earthquake Haiti", was formed to show sustain and share updates and news. It had more than 14,000 members and some users even pleaded for aid to the injured Haitians in the group. Using email, Twitter and Public networking sites like Facebook, thousands of volunteers as part of task Ushahidi were able to map reports sent by habitancy from Haiti.
The most impressive part of the Public media's impact on Haiti is the charity text-message donations that soared to over million for the victims in Haiti. habitancy concerned in helping the victims are encouraged to text, tweet and publicize their sustain using various Public networking sites. The Global Philanthropy Group had also started a campaign to ask wealthy habitancy and celebrities, like Ben Stiller and John Legend to use Twitter and Facebook to encourage others to give to Unicef. An aid worker, Saundra Schimmelpfennig, allowed the advice from other aid workers and donors to post on her blog concerning to choosing which charitable organisations to support. In the meantime, donors were request questions in Twitter, Facebook and blogs about their donations and endorsements of their favourite charities. After every crisis, the Public media for Public cause becomes a more productive medium to spread the word.
Negative Effects of Public Media
There are always two sides of every coin. Public media is just a tool or mean for habitancy to use. It is still up to the users on how to use this tool (just like a knife, can help you to cut food or hurt others). Pew study Center's Internet & American Life task and Elon University's Imagining the Internet center conducted a study on "The future of Online Socializing" from the extremely engaged, diverse set of respondents to an online, opt-in scrutinize consisted of 895 technology stakeholders and critics. The negative effects presented by the respondents included time spent online robs time from foremost face-to-face relationships; the internet fosters mostly shallow relationships; the act of leveraging the internet to engage in Public connection exposes hidden information; the internet allows habitancy to silo themselves, limiting their exposure to new ideas; and the internet is being used to engender intolerance.
Some respondents also highlighted that there will be development of some new psychological and curative syndromes that will be "variations of depression caused by the lack of meaningful ability relationships", and a "new world society". The term, "Social Networking", has begun to deceive the users to believe they are Public creatures. For instance, spending a combine of hours using Farmville and chatting with friends concurrently does not turn into Public skills. habitancy come to be dependent on the technology and forget how to socialise in face-to-face context. The online personality of a man might be totally dissimilar from his/her offline character, causing chaos when the two personalities meet. It is apparent in online dating when the combine gets together in face-to-face for the first time. Their written profiles do not clearly recite their real-life characters. It is more enticing for habitancy to type something that others want to hear than saying the truth.
Besides the "friendship", creators of Public networking sites and users redefine the term, "privacy" in the Internet as well. The challenge in data privacy is to share data while protecting personally identifiable information. practically any information posted on Public networking sites is permanent. Whenever man posts pictures or videos on the web, it becomes viral. When the user deletes a video from his/her Public network, man might have kept it and then posted it onto other sites like YouTube already. habitancy post photographs and video files on Public networking sites without mental and the files can reappear at the worst potential time. In 2008, a video of a group of Acjc students hazing a female student in school on her birthday was circulated and an additional one video of a Scdf recruit being "welcomed" (was hosed with water and tarred with shoe polish) to a local fire center made its way online.
Much news has been reported about online privacy breach in Facebook and Facebook is constantly revising their privacy course and changing their privacy controls for the users. Interestingly, even when users delete their personal information and deactivate their Facebook account, Facebook will still keep that information and will continue to use it for data mining. A reporter asked whether the data will at least be anonymized. The Facebook representative declined to comment.
In the corporate world, human resource managers can entrance Facebook or MySpace to get to know about a candidate's true colours, especially when job seekers do not set their profiles to private. study has found that practically half of employers have rejected a potential employee after finding incriminating material on their Facebook pages. Some employers have also checked the candidates' online details in Facebook pages to see if they are lying about their qualifications. Nowadays, younger generations have a complete disregard for their own privacy, chance doors to unwelcome predators or stalkers.
Impact of communal Media on society