Social Media and Globalisation

 Social Media and Globalisation

Social media app	How often do I use the app	Why do I use the app?
Instagram	Every day	Entertainment - Social Interaction
Snapchat	Every day	To socialise with friends
TikTok	Every day	Entertainment reasons
YouTube	Every day	Entertainment reasons
Pinterest	Every day	Entertainment reasons/To find reference photos for art and photos of interest

Uses and gratification theory

Active:Able to intemperate media texts as form opinions

Passive:Consume media texts for the sake of it, without forming opinions/interpreting

Uses and Grats - Blumer + Katz

Blumer (Theorists)

P- Personal identity

I- Information

E- Entertainment/Escapism

S- Social Interaction

This theory assumes that active audiences consume media texts for one or more gratification

Web 1.0

The ‘web’ was initially developed in 1991 by Sir Tim Berners-Lee

It was originally an information space, wherein consumers could access information

It was fairly static, though hypertext (i.e. text that could be linked) was in development

Web 2.0

A term coined by Tim O’Reilly and Dale Dougherty in 2004

Essentially, it is the theory that websites increasingly offered the potential for audience participation and collaboration

In 20004, David Gauntlett suggested that traditional models of media ‘gatekeeping’ (mediated to the ‘little people’ by ‘media gods’) were gradually being eroded, and consumers were given a voice through enhanced web technologies, becoming prosumers

Web 2.0 site allows users to interact and collaborate with each other in social media dialogue as creators (prosumers) of user-generated content

Web 2.0 or ‘new digital media’ shapes the relations of public/private, work/non-word, home/outside home

Mobile phones enhance social connections that have always existed: gossip, making arrangements etc.

Web 3.0

The so-called ‘Semantic Web’. Web 3.0 was a term first used by John Markoff in 2006.

The Semantic Web is the process of allowing machines to understand the meaning of hyperlinked information to personalise content to audiences

Effectively, the web becomes intelligent - it tracks your preferences and habits. In a commercial sense, personalised advertisements van reach you.

Web 4.0

The future

Databases of personal information

Potential for intelligent avatar agents acting, for example, as shopping assistants for audiences 

Semantic Search

The search engine you’re using (Chrome, Safari) looks for literal matches of the query to words you input/type, without understanding the actual meaning of the query

For example, if you were to type into Google “What is the largest mammal”, Google would see to match specific works and possible follow up questions e.g. “how big is it?”, “where does it live?” and provide you with webpages linking to those exact keywords

Social Media Channels

Social Media is user by individual members of the public, media producer, celebrities, commercial businesses, political activists, news agencies, charities, and many other groups to communicate and reach out to audiences

The channels are the different types of products used in order to do this

Prosumers create UCG - User Generated Content - the term primarily refers to nonprofessionals generating content

Use of social media

Socal Media Channel	Person who uses it	Why he/she uses it
YouTube	YouTubers	To create specialised content for viewers
Instagram	Celebrites	To keep fans updates on their lives and even to do brand deals
Twitch	Streamers	To live stream games and also to make money out of it
Twitter	Politicians	They sometimes use twitter as a way of stating opinions and broadcasting ideas

Instagram - An online and mobile photo and video sharing social network service that enables its users to take pictures and videos, and share them across other social media channels. Originally, a distinctive feature was that it confined photos to a square shape in a retro fashion that was similar to 1980’s Kodak Instamatic and Polaroid images, which adds to the creativity and personalisation of the image. Instagram is a subsidiary company of facebook that was acquired in 2012

Facebook - An online social networking service thats as created by Marc Zuckerberg in February 2004. Initially it was a networking service the allowed Harvard students to communicate to one another, but it quickly expanded to other American universities and schools. It was launched globally in 2006, and allows individuals to collate and communicate with a network of friends. It is used by media products all over the world to reach audiences. According to Facebook’s own 2015 statistics it has over 1.1 billions global users and a commercial revenue of over £10 billion

YouTube - a Video on Demand (VoD) and video sharing service, launched in 2005. the service took full advantage of rapid chances to the speed of broadcast technologies and is considered one of the first Web 2.0 technologies that gave audiences a voice and the ability to share user-generated content. YouTube is a subsidiary of Google, and post-2007 grew increasingly commercialised as it became a major part of their business model. Aside from prosumer and unser generated video, there are specific channels for television and film companies such as BBC, Sky, Universal, Hulu and Disney. In fact, it is so often the first okay that users go to access streaming content such as music videos of film trailers (which are major form of advertising and marketing a core product such as an album or film release)

SoundCloud - a global online, collaborative audio distribution channel founded in 2007. SoundCloud enables any user to upload, record, promote and share their originally created sounds and download material. It is also a streaming service to enable others to access new music simply. It allows musicians to collaborate with one another online through requests for partnership with others.

Twitter - an online social networking and microblogging service mainly used from the smartphone app that enables users to send and read short limited character messages called tweets. Twitter was founded in 2006 and has become one of the most recognisable social media brands of the past decade. Hashtags are commonly used so that a registered user's tweet can be accessed more readily by others. The reach of Twitter has been credited with the promotion of large-scale social feeling or movements such as the global circulation of photographs and commentary that included hashtags such as: #arabspring 

Twitch - A video live streaming service which mainly focuses on video game streaming. Twitch offers music broadcasts, and recently real life streams. Content on the site can either be viewed live or via video on demand. It's operated by Twitch Interactive which is a subsidiary of Amazon. Twitch was launched on June 6th 2011 and by February 2014 was considered the largest source of peak Internet traffic in the US. By 2015, Twitch had more than 100 million viewers per month. Twitch currently has 3 million broadcasters monthly and 15 million daily active users along with a concurrent 1.4 million users.

There are many other social media channels and technologies that allow users to connect, collaborate and share material. these include:

• LinkedIn
• Flickr
• Spotify
• Pinterest
• Tumblr
• Google+
• Vine
• Kickstarter
• Snapchat

Social Media Debates

Pessimistic positions	Optimistic (utopian) positions
Social networking substitutes to actual physical relationships. In encourages trivial communication, and leads to unhappiness because lack of ‘real’ human contact and the ability to understand the range of ‘face to face’ contact	Living in the golden age: The iPhone serve as a multimedia do it all app-fest
It is shaping people in narcissistic, inarticulate and often autistic ways and a result of lack of social contact with others. This accompanies internet addiction which in growing around the world, especially in China, where it is seen as a threat to the nation’s youth	McLuhan’s assertion that we are now living in an electronic ‘global village’ which can heal the era dominated by print forms and national boundaries
Bullying and ignorant comments that would not be allowed in proper ‘public’ places	Global and local protest, art, charitable forms of action now use interactive media to shape things
	Twitter is valued for its immediacy and its short message that can be followed up else where