What is Social about Social media?
Social media is one of the results after the creation of the internet, or as it was called “the world wide web” in 1990. If we were to look up social media, we would never be able to find just one definition. For instance, according to Merriam Webster social media is defined as: “forms of electronic communication (such as websites for social networking and microblogging) through which users create online communities to share information, ideas, personal messages, and other content (such as videos)” (Merriam-Webster, 2018); while the Cambridge dictionary defines it as “websites and computer programs that allow people to communicate and share information on the internet using a computer or mobile phone” (Cambridge, 2018). One can argue which of these two definitions best describes social media, or maybe it’s a mixture of both.
If we were to start with why social media is used, we would say: post and share about our daily life, share pictures, share memories, and share some more and more. The abundant use of the word share in this previous sentence is to shine the light on what social media is really about: Sharing our own lives and personal details with the world. When did people start caring more about the number of likes on their pictures than the wellbeing of their families, or started to buy followers for the sake of the image. Why has social media turned us to such attention seekers that some are selling themselves for the fifteen minutes of fame they will get from posting an image or any post.
Let us take a few steps back in time and analyze what it was like before the creation of the internet. How did people communicate and share? With letters? Morse Code? Aren’t these also ways to communicate? What if social media has been around for a long time but we have only realized it now that the internet is a part of everybody’s daily life. The only difference between back than is today is that today people like Marc Zuckerberg make money out of or information.
According to Zuckerberg: ‘When we started Facebook, we built it around a few simple ideas. People want to share and stay connected with their friends and the people around them. When you have control over what you share, you want to share more. When you share more, the world becomes more open and connected.” (Zuckerberg, 2010) What if we are being lied to when we are taught that sharing is caring. Caring for whom? The people making money out of our private information? Facebook has also stated that they: “never sold and will never sell user information’, because they don’t have to, Facebook’s value comes in owning user data not in selling it.” (Zuckerberg, 2010) Just as the statement said: they own the data. Who is to blame today if our lives don’t belong to us anymore and belong to the wide communities out there making money out of them. All of this belongs to what we call Web 2.0; before defining what web 2.0 let us take a few steps back again and see where all of this started and if the problems also started back than.
The Web 1.0 was initially put in place for companies to attempt and make money. What went wrong? Why was It a failed attempt? Because people refused to pay for online content which lead to illegal downloads and piracy. When it came down to commercializing the web, Hagel (1997) stated that it was an: aggregation of Internet communities around certain areas by info-mediaries, which could then sold audiences to advertisers. (Sam Hinton, 2013) From this pervious statement we realize that this issue was created when the internet started to be marketed for social media. Who is to blame for what we today call Web 2.0? According to O’Reilly(2004) the users are to blame: ‘Network effects’ created by users contributions are the key to Web 2.0 business enterprises. (Dudezert, 2012) In a way it is stated that the abundance use of these users are what lead to the creation and increase of Web 2.0.
My next question here would be: When do the users stop being users and become products? To emphasize the use of the word product. Products are items that can be sold. How are we items? Our personal information is used and sold to big companies so they can make money out of it. So the real question here is again: When did we start to become products?
According to Vaidhyanathan: We are Google products, not its customers” (Newman, 2011)How you might ask? The control of mechanism of information society. To be clearer, users of social media are sorted, counted, organized, have labels stuck on them and are grouped to be matched with processes and products. The next question here is: Who are we being sold to? Advertisers. We our being sold to advertisers. That is how they make money, they feed of our likes and dislikes, they stalk our lives, determine what we want and then they use it against us to sell them back to us.
Below are varieties of pictures that depict the sad truth of what our lives today have become because of social media.
In a nutshell, to answer the question: what is social about social media? Sharing information. That is it. The only social aspect of it is to share what we do every day with the world, our likes, dislikes, our daily routine, what we eat, what we do and so on with the world and have them being used against us in order for us to be experiments and products for big companies, such things as online scams and cyberbullying even emerged but that is another paper. Now, do not get me wrong, so may things can be positive about social media such as: job opportunities, being connected with out families abroad, always being up to date with what is happening and so on. Nevertheless, I believe that the bad impact of social media is way outnumbers the positives.
