New Comm Tech

This weeks lecture was titled “Media, New Media and Social Media”.

When technology is used for social and cultural communication, it becomes a “medium of communication”… or the plural media.  This definition differs in a way from the more common usage to describe the popular venues for news journalism.

The themes of virtual community and individual identity were discussed, especially in relation to early internet usage.  Today, as nearly all of the developed world uses the internet on a regular basis, it’s much harder to identify a “virtual community” so to speak.  This can be demonstrated by looking at online social interactions: 20 years ago, people used the internet to converse about similar interests with people from across the globe.  Since Web 2.0 has become the online-norm, we use the internet to better connect with family, friends, colleagues and classmates.

Web 1.0 and 2.0 are terms coined to describe the shift in online trends after the burst of the dot com bubble in 1999.  Web 1.0 was mainly static HTML websites in the vain of Geocities and Tripod.  When 2.0 became the standard, a higher priority was placed on user-generated content and “social networking”.  Whether this shift in attitudes is a good thing or not is up for debate: at least most people making a Geocities page had at least some basic HTML/CSS knowledge (as opposed to the average Myspace atrocity).

This leads to the final point of the lecture.  There have been a wave of “professionals” recently who have been calling themselves “social media experts”.  However, these are just a particularly annoying group of marketing people who want to show business how best to optimize Web 2.0 technologies.  However, could anyone really BE a social media expert.  As TIME magazine pointed out when they named their Person of the Year in 2006… social media is made up of us.  Youtube and Facebook are possibly the most egalitarian websites on the internet.  Everyone can upload their own content and have an equal opportunity to be viewed.