The Social Media How it changed the way we communicate...

Dear Readers,

I would like to share everybody that as of September 2011 this year these are the key players of the social network provider 
available in the world of planet earth....

SOCIAL

Social has been around for a very long time. In the beginning, social meant a group of hunters, later it meant a group of people who were living together to grow crops.   Later on, it meant people living together in a village and people living together in a city.  Then we started having sub-groups of the groups.  For example, people working together in a factory. 

Now, we have a very different idea of what social is, because with the Internet, social now means everyone in the world, no matter the time and space, who is connected to the Internet. You can wonder if that’s a good idea, but it’s a fact that we can communicate directly with whomever we need to. We don’t need people in between anymore. This is a big social development, not only that it is a huge development as far as socializing is concern.

MEDIA

By establishing a lobby group is pretty much made possible by the media part of social media.  When we look back at the media component, this used to be word of mouth and we started out by communicating one on one, or one with few, using language.

The the media evolved, They move more closely to real time. Now with radio and TV, its much closer to real time. Components were added to make the medium much more like one-on-one conversations, or one-to-many conversations. In radio, we get the content and the tonality, and the expression of the voice. For example, two people talk to each other and it’s totally clear who is who. You can paint auditory background sound as well to have information come across, for example, being at the main train station. You can have  sounds, and you can also have music that comes from every directions. This way, media moves closer to what it would like to have two people talk to each other in reality.

Then TV came around and added the visual layer. It was a very important move, because obviously humans are very visually oriented and 80% of our information usually depends on visual information. When it comes to internet as a form of media, and there is a main difference between all those media and the Internet, and that is, the Internet has a back channel.

The Internet gives you all the possibilities of books, print and text, audio — you can have video.  The main difference is that you don’t need to own a TV station to publish a video on YouTube.  

Let us take a look at YouTube for example.  This is moving very close to real time.  On a good day, It takes about probably 15 minutes to transcribe a video, it allows you to upload a video from almost everyway almost instantly. You can upload a video from your mobile phone and you can even stream live through channels like You Stream or Quick, so people can watch you directly.  Everyone can contribute, it’s like democracy.  In your mobile phone, you can take a video and upload it right away so it can be online in a matter of minutes.  Everyone has the same right to answer, and it is as quick as possible.  You can answer with just a text, or you can answer with audio and video attachments.

You can’t answer to the newspaper article with a video, but you can answer or react  to a YouTube post by writing comment.  The different thing now is that it is not the maker of the show who says “Okay your comment will be featured”, or “I want your video comment on that.”   The social rules now pretty much dictates on any social media that no filtering takes place.  If a comment is against the law, obviously, it should be deleted.  If a comment is not adhering to the social rules that this medium uses, it should be deleted.  Other than these two, all of the other different opinions can be exchanged or posted.

On top of that, now, we have a revolution which includes the location of a user.  When you post a comment or if you post a video on YouTube, and you do that through your mobile phone, you can get a GeoTag.  This means that people can see where you are and this increases the utility of commenting on even a lot more. But this is something for another article.

SOCIAL MEDIA IS HERE TO STAY

Social Media has profoundly changed the way we communicate and interact with each other be it a one to one interaction or one to many interaction.  So What happens if any one of the above social media has grown into global community, let say when Facebook reaches 3 billion mark active and registered users, and if it were a country wouldn't  Facebook be the 1 country with the highest population int the world? 

As big systems are slow to move – so do not expect the world to change directly after facebook reaches highest active users – but they do change. No system can stay the same with that much internal structure changing. Social Media is changing the world – Let’s take part for the better! 


Resource : 
http://www.wikipedia.com
http://martinmetzmacher.com
http://www.charlottebp.com