SOCIAL MEDIA

As a humanbeing, someone has to communicate with another person. Interaction with other people can be done in many ways like calling, texting, netting and so on. Nowadays, people love to communicate using internet as the media. Many sites on the internet support our social needs. Realizing how important social media is, it is better to learn more about it, its classification and advantages and disadvantages of its usage.

There are two terms of social media such as social media and mobile social media. Social media refers to interaction among people in virtual communities and networks which allow them to create content, share, and/or exchange information, while mobile social media refers to a group of internet-based application that allows all of social media activities.

Social media is classified into 6 types which are collaborative projects (Wikipedia), blogs or microblogs (Blogspot, Twitter), content communities (Youtube), social networking sites (Facebook), virtual game worlds (World of Warcraft), and virtual social worlds (mIRC). These kinds of social media allow people to create their own content and/or enriched other people's content. Hence, virtual game worlds only considered as a social media if they facilitated their users to make or exchange information. On the other side, mobile social media is devided into 4 groups: space-timers (Foursquare), space-locator (Qype), quick-timers (posting in Twitter), and slow-timers (watching video on Youtube). Eventhough there are so many kinds of social media, they share the same function to connect people through a virtual communication directly or undirectly.

Social media brings many advantages for human life. People can learn or explore more about somethings just by one simple click on Wikipedia webpage. While Facebook or other social networking sites not only let people to interact with their acquaintances through their messaging feature but also advertise oneself and form friendship between people who are completely strangers in a more private communication compared to real life. By using social media, we can become a content creator which provides networked individuals to reach wider audience and can positively affect their social standing. These details are mentioned by Lee Rainie and Barry Wellman on their book "Networked - The New Social Operating Systems". Despite its benefits, social media also has many disadvantages. There can be cyber-bullying among the users. There are also many sites of pornography which can expose our children about something they should not have known yet and make them targeted by unresponsible sexual predators. Ironically, social media not only connects people but it also separates them by reducing face-to-face interaction. Especially for teenagers, social media users infected by FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) virus which makes them feel uneasy whenever they cannot check their social media account for a while.

Social media, undoubtedly, has become one of our most social needs. We do not need to avoid them if we can use them wisely.