Week five

'Social Media'!

‘Social Media’ was the topic of discussion in New Communication Technologies this week and whether or not it is destroying today’s society. The term ‘Social Media’ indeed covers a rather broad spectrum involving that of publishing, sharing, playing, networking, buying and localization. In modern day society, there is no doubt that people look to social media, such as facebook and twitter in order to communicate with others. In my opinion, I do believe that social media has had a rather negative impact upon society, however, it is and always will be appealing to us as it allows people to express themselves to the public eye in ways that they would otherwise struggle with in the real world.

Personally, I would say that I use both sharing and publishing social media quite regularly, including facebook, instagram and tumblr. The reason for this being, mostly for my own enjoyment, however I do admit that a great deal of my time is most certainly wasted on social media, time that I could be doing something more productive. Social media is however, a great way to communicate with others, although I feel that with online communication available, people don’t put in as much effort to meet in person to communicate as much as they would if social media did not exist.

Moving on now to discuss both web 1.0 and 2.0, there are definitely a number of differences that can be identified. Web 1.0 involves rather limited interaction between both site and web user. It does not give the user the authority to add or modify content, however does allow for the use of web sites to retrieve information. In comparison, web 2.0 allows its’ users to interact more freely with one another and grants them with the opportunity to conduct modifications to already existing web content.

Web 3.0 involves computers that have the ability to interpret information on the same scale as humans, thus the reason why web 3.0 is referred to in relation to the future.

This weeks tutorial task asked us to create our own survey consisting of five questions relating to Social Media. The following are the questions to which I included within my survey:

    1.Which out of the following Social Media do you use?

    2.Why do you use Social Media?

    3.Would you say that you rely heavily on Social Media?

    4.What are the benefits of using Social Media?

       5.Do you think that Social Media has had a negative impact on todays society?

Personally, I found it rather interesting to see what other users (via facebook) had to say about Social Media. There were a number of trends that I noticed when reviewing the results.

Q1. Facebook seemed to be the most favoured, followed closely by instagram and youtube.

Q2. The most common reason for using Social Media included easy communication with family and friends.

Q3. Majority of users claimed that they only relied on Social Media ‘sometimes’.

Q4. Again, communication and keeping in contact with friends and family was a significant benefit as well as educational reasons.

Q5. 66.67% of people voted yes, while 33.33% voted no, in regards to question 5. The significant reason for those claiming ‘yes’ was due to the fact that people are ‘losing their ability to communicate with others in person’ as well as ‘cyber bullying’.

- Milli Marryat.

- WittyCookie (2012) 'What are the major differences among Web 1.0, 2.0 and 3.0?'.

- Paul Sheehan (2012) 'Internet giants can earn with ease, it's the churn they must fear', Sydney Morning Herald, June 7.