Social Media
Social Media is the term used to categorize web and mobile technologies in which the concept of communication is at our fingertips and can now be an interactive dialogue between peers, businesses, consumers, fanatics, and anyone who wishes to make their voice heard. The concept of social media is easily understandable however, the branches of this huge tree are continuously growing expanding.
Social media takes many forms and seems to be growing by the second with new ways of communication. Wikipedia categorizes social media into six groups: “collaborative projects, blogs and microblogs, content communities, social networking sites, virtual game worlds, and virtual social worlds”.
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The collaborative projects are the wikis. Wiki.org describes a wiki as “a piece of server software that allows users to freely create and edit Web page content using and Web browser”. Through this course, I have joined the social media bandwagon and created a wiki with other students, as well as started a blog. Information Systems: A Manager’s Guide to Harnessing explains that “blogs first emerged almost a decade ago as a medium for posting online diaries”. This is an example of the blog that I am writing on now; it is a sort of diary that I have been adding to with the addition of new information learned throughout the course. Microblogs are messages such as Tweets; instant messaging where a consumer can praise a company for their customer service or respond to something that has just happened and they feel the need to share with the public at large. Content communities would be considered YouTube where they have reached such a high capacity that there are “over twenty hours of video uploaded each minute” according to Information Systems. Facebook has a new competitor in the social networking sites. Google+ has emerged in this section of social media and although it will take a long time for them to gain the amount of loyal fans that Facebook has, they are seeking out new opportunities to spread their wings such as the Android OS. According to PC World, “It's a genius idea that will inevitably result in more Google+ users, since many people have no experience whatsoever with Google+ thus far. By encouraging Ice Cream Sandwich users to sign up, the social network will be getting exposure to millions of people who don't know what it is or how it works. And some of them are going to like it.” World of Warcraft (WOW) is the best example of virtual game worlds; 12 million people according to worldofwarcraft.net have taken up this online role-playing game. Second Life was listed as an example by Wikipedia for virtual social worlds. It is like a new world in which a person can create their own avatar and socialize with others and create their own virtual property such as in the real world with housing and jobs. I personally do not have any experience with this form of social media, however my 12 year old daughter does in Littlest Pet Shop. In this site she takes over the identity of the stuffed animals that we purchased, they are then able to buy things for their rooms, grow gardens, and interact with other “friends” that they have accepted on the site.
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It seems hard to accomplish anything without coming in contact with some form of social media. The last class that I took at UF required me to have a Facebook account, in this class I now have a Blog, Google+, and a wiki. I am extremely interested in seeing what will come next and in what way it will be threaded into my personal, scholarly, or professional life.
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