Social media are interactive technologies. It means that a person can make the device do an action in real time. The term device refers to electronic object (computers, smartphone, tablets). Social media allow the creation of information. They also allowed the sharing of ideas, interests and expressions.
Social Media created virtual communities and networks. Virtual communities are people with same interests that meet online. A network is group of people who work together but in different places. Social media changed the way of communicating. They created a new way of exchange of information. So, social media are new communication tools. Before social media, people liked to go out so they could communicate with friends. Now people prefer to share their ideas, interests and emotions on social media. When chatting with a person you can use emojis. They were invented to better communicate your feelings.
The positive aspects of social media
One of the positive aspects (benefits) of the creation of social media is the fast communication. Before this creation, communication was slow. Because you had to wait to meet a person to tell something.
Now you can give information in real time (instantly). You can send a photo, a short text or a voice recording. The other person receives the message immediately (few seconds). This is possible thanks to program created to communicate (application).
Another positive aspect is to meet new people staying at home. Thanks to social media it is simple to find people with same interest. You can write your interest on the application (app) and start a conversation. To send messages on social media people write messages on chat. However, we have to be careful.
The negative aspects of social media
Social Media were created to connect distant people together. But now people are losing interest in meeting others in person. People prefer doing everything online.
Second negative aspect is that young people create new words. It is difficult to understand young languages. They mix together different word or languages.
For this reason, none respects grammar rules. This implies difficulty in understanding the message of the other. So, they also use the emojis. But each person uses them in different way. It depends of the perspective of each person.
Old web’s traditional distinction is that it mainly had read-only content, websites and portals, and content belonging to authors. In the case of WEB 2.0-social media we have a large number of users, read-write content, and the ease to create and share it.
“Social media is about conversations, community, connecting with the audience, and building relationships. It is not just a broadcast channel or a sales and marketing tool. Social media not only allows you to hear what people say about you, but enables you to respond.” ◉ TUFTS / Social Media Overview
It is very easy and quick to create quality content in WEB 2.0 and make it easily searchable. There are more and more services in the cloud as well as non-traditional channels and web-based applications to access and create content.
Take RSS for example, a web feed that allows people to access updates to websites in a standardized, computer-readable format. These feeds allow people to monitor of many different websites in a single news aggregator.
Owing to the development of Semantic search, users can find very precise information. There is also an increase in searches that are made through images or speech. Nevertheless, the use of social media poses a question of privacy to its users.
Virtual Reality and Augmented reality provide users entirely new, interactive experiences and in-depth communication. Example: augmented reality app Snow. The “Internet of Things” is the interconnection of various devices with the Internet embedded in them. It enables them to send and receive data while offering people an opportunity to be more efficient, save time, money, and accelerate their communication. Indeed, social media shaped millennial culture through new rituals, symbols, gifs, sound bites, chats, brief moments, and transitory flashes of content. Increasingly, social media encompasses augmentative and alternative communication (AAC). These are devices, systems, strategies, and tools that replace or support natural speech. These tools support people who have difficulties communicating through speech.
Content customization goes far beyond simple picture editing and captioning. Outlets like Snapchat have provided users with the ability and drive to add stickers, drawings, and (most notably) filters. As phones became more capable, changing the overall image of oneself has become second nature before posting. Twitter introduced the hashtag to help users filter trending topics. Users have been able to go through the “What’s Happening” field of their homepage to gain insight into global events and national news.
Even Facebook, a personal profile origin media, has become increasingly more journalistic by highlighting trending topics. It was taken a step further when trending news was given its own section in the Facebook mobile app. With the addition of Facebook Live in 2016, users quickly went from sharing private, fun, and touching moments with their friends, to becoming on-spot journalists and recording everything from police shootings to opioid abuse cases.
Live videos helped build serious momentum behind civil rights movements. “Ephemeral Content” has been a relatively recent trend in social media: temporary content that is only available for a short time before disappearing. Snapchat, Instagram, and Facebook stories are the most famous examples of it. It panders to the shrunken attention of social media users and offers very short, sometimes engaging stories that become increasingly popular. Chatbots have also grown in social media popularity, especially among businesses, as they are relatively easy to set up on social media.
The entry of AI tools, like chatbots, on various platforms continues to increase daily. An important and distinctive feature of social media are its algorithms. Undeniably, they already influence almost every aspect of our digital lives including what content we watch, read, what channels we discover, and even who we meet.
Sources: https://www.theeducationmagazine.com/word-art/social-media-affects-communication/
TUFTS / Social Media Overview