Social Media and Us: Co-shaping the interpersonal interaction and social activities
At Indiana University Bloomington, 09.28.2018
Nowadays, interactive computer-mediated technologies play a significant role in our daily interpersonal communication and interaction. Having been one of the hotspots in computer- mediated technology for years, social media have several essential impacts on information dissemination and thus on organizing social activities. If we define social media as the online space where allows interactive information sharing and creation, it penetrates several aspects in our social life including social networking (e.g. Linkedin, Facebook, etc.), video-sharing (e.g. Youtube, Vimeo, etc.), and even games (e.g. Minecraft).
As put by Steve Matthewman in Technology and Social Theory [1], technology is a slippery term and could be defined in a different perspective. Social media, in this case, goes beyond a virtual object (computer-mediated information sharing platform), an activity (online information creation and dissemination) and knowledge (of computer media use and language) and finally can be viewed as a sociotechnical system and means by which weaves the threads of social fabrics. This paper, therefore, takes this perspective to see how social media construct and formulate social activities, facilitate interpersonal communication and generate either constructive, destructive or neutral unexpected effects on social interaction and organization.
Social Media as Extension and Construction
No matter it is an instant messenger, blog or video editing/sharing platform, social media currently has taken a great amount of time in our everyday media usage (laptops, mobile phones). Social media has helped us to overcome the physical barriers in communication, whether it is spatial or temporal. For communication in each social level, i.e. individual, community and even society etc., the potential economic and time costs which should have been spent on accessing, advertising and organizing the activities have been largely reduced or even removed. A simple swipe or tap on your Facebook homepage, for instance, will show you what speech, party or festival will be set up, including how, when and even the information of your friends who are planning to go along with their comments on the events in a few seconds. If we see telephone as an extension of our ears which allows us to listen to people in the distance, social media in this context works as an extension of four senses and further enrich the contents available for people. Facebook in this example somehow works like a virtual bulletin board which creates a space which enables information perception and feedback.
As we can see, one of the means by which social media organize social communities and interpersonal interaction is using metaphors to extend the physical interaction. Compared to the implicit and perhaps mixed metaphors of a bulletin board, straightforward metaphors are also used such as “Facebook Marketplace”, chat rooms etc. These metaphors are mundane and easy to be understood, which explicitly express the potential usage of the virtual counterpart of physical areas or activities. However, due to the different characteristics of physical and virtual space, the meaning of the same behaviors varies enormously. What happens in online chatrooms, for example, is actually not information sharing via sound, which is the activity happens in a real chat room. Thus, at times metaphors borrowed from other fields are implemented to create new forms of online interaction of which a physical counterpart cannot be pinpointed. For example, bilibili.com is one of the most popular video-sharing platforms among younger generations. It first introduced the feature Danmu, which means “barrage” in English, as a chatting channel. At any time while one is watching the video and send a comment through as a thread of danmu, it shows up at that moment over the top of the video moving from the rightmost side to the left just as a text bullet. Danmu here, Far from its original meaning as “concentrated artillery bombardment”, actually indicates the movement of each thread is similar to a bullet and when it reaches a certain density it looks like concentrated bullet group.
By constructing physical counterparts as the extension of offline communication and introducing new means of interaction, social media enrich or even changes the way of information exchange and even leads to evolution in various fields. For example, Facebook can be used as a learning platform which gathers students to engage in discussion, which increases learning opportunities. [2] Tons of pieces of information generated within seconds can be used as a valuable data collection resource. Mark Dredze developed a probabilistic graphical model to collect health-related data generated from March 2009 and October 2010. His study reveals a great amount of information that people possibly are reluctant to or forget to talk about in the hospital or to their physicians due to privacy. Twitter to some extent contributes to promoting disease surveillance, supporting health risk evaluation and enhances the public health capabilities to a higher level which traditionally couldn’t be achieved. [3] As the development of social media, it also has more influence on social topics or even policymakers. The Chinese film Dying to Survive, based on a real event, tells the story happened in 2015 about Chinese young man Lu Yong who smuggled cheap medicine for leukemia patients who cannot afford the legally sold medicine with an insane price. During the whole chain of trading, social media plays an irreplaceable role, which is Lu Yong used chat rooms to make the trading information go viral among the net of leukemia patients. This event eventually caught the attention of the Chinese government. However, the population of the patients makes the Chinese government aware of the unreasonable pricing policy for cancer medicine and initiated health care reform in 2018 accordingly. Though social media’s effect in this reform is indirect and it did facilitate crime, we can clearly see that how it weaves the social fabrics.
Pervasively used, social media contrast interpersonal link and communication through appropriating metaphors either from the counterpart in the real world to extend the interaction space or borrowed from seemingly unrelated fields to manifest its virtual characteristics. Its ubiquity has already become the driven force of social activities and changes.
Destructive and Unexpected Impacts
Technology at times are neutral and how people use it largely decide its impact. At the same time when social media enables us to go beyond the gap in communication created by physical limitations and strengthen interpersonal connection and gives rise to certain kind of freedom, it also allows the spread of destructive power in communication. As in the movie Dying to Survive, social media actually assist the illegal medicine trading. In our daily life due to the freedom created by social media, people are given more opportunities to express, usually anonymously. Cyberbullying, including threatening, spreading rumors and sexual harassment then has grown exponentially these years. Lack of self-management and regulation, children and adolescents can easily get involved in cyberbullying, either as a victim or perpetrator. [2]
Moreover, even though social media reduce the barriers of interpersonal communication, it raises certain kind of constraints on interaction as well. Instead of listening and speaking, texting and reading are the main approaches to information exchange on social media. This provides more control of the social interaction. Compared to verbal communication, for example, text messages can be carefully structured and viewed before sending. Without spending time on makeup and workout, a few taps on an APP can produce a well-retouched photo. People can actually conceive others to have a fake imagination of ones’ live by delicately choosing which aspects of their lives to show and what to express. This not only creates peer pressure [4] to those who receive the well-selected content but in some circumstances also bring isolation to those who create and share the content out of the competition. [2] Thus, social media, in fact, weaken, instead of strengthens, the link between individuals.
Indeed, although information exchange is increasingly promoted by nowadays technology- mediated communication, interaction and relationship are not only about information exchange. Those essential components in building a healthy relationship, including trust and intimacy etc. need attention, efforts and time. A blink or a frown can convey more information instantly during the in-person interaction. The long-term in-person company also has irreplaceable power in providing supports and strengthen mental health. While those are not yet achieved by social media. Clicking a “like” is never like saying “I’m fascinated by the vague melancholy on your face when you performed on the stage” but more like a voting system which only allows binary decision. However, approaches are developed to compensate the richness (e.g. emoji are used to express emotions) of content in communication. Furthermore, technologies like virtual reality and ubiquitous computing are still working on eliminating those constraints and promoting multi-modality interaction.
After decades of development, different kinds of users and all kinds of services provided by social media has evolved into complex ecology where various activities are organized. It changes the way we acquire information and sharing knowledge in personal life as well as professional fields as well as creating new side effects. The journey of weaving the social fabrics with technology will never end. Along with those unexpected results, it becomes even more fascinating.
References:
[1] Matthewman, S. (2011). Technology and social theory. Macmillan International Higher Education.
[2] O’Keeffe, G. S., & Clarke-Pearson, K. (2011). Clinical report — the impact of social media on children, adolescents, and families. Pediatrics, peds-2011.
[3] Dredze, M. (2012). How social media will change public health. IEEE Intelligent Systems, 27(4), 81–84.
[4] Chua, T. H. H., & Chang, L. (2016). Follow me and like my beautiful selfies: Singapore teenage girls’ engagement in self-presentation and peer comparison on social media. Computers in Human Behavior, 55, 190–197.
