What does social media mean?
In yesterday's class we were asked to define social media. Something so meander that I never really thought about it, and was almost perplexed at my difficulty in describing exactly what social media means. Do I want to define it from a public relations perspective, an everyday user perspective or etc? Social media can mean different things to different aspects of our society. By the end of class I had come up with this as a definition:
Social Media are a media where individuals or groups go from consumers to active producers of information through internet and web-based technologies to interact instantaneously with a public while actively building relationships and maintaining transparency.
(Note: I defined it from a public relations perspective!) But I still think it is lacking. My question is: is social media solely based on internet technologies? I think social media go beyond the Internet. I think it needs to incorporate the behavior of individuals as well, because no one can disagree that social media has drastically changed the way we communicate. So you have to take into consideration the relationship-building aspect that is so finely associated with social media.
In yesterday's we also discussed the notion of product placement in films v. celebrity endorsements in tweets, is there a difference?
I believe that there is no difference. We (as a collective society) do not require that films explicitly state their endorsements during a scene so why should Twitter? It's not as if Twitter is a public service, so I don't think that that kind of transparency has to exist. I think Twitter and similar social networking sites (like Wikipedia) depend upon user accountability to call out the wrong-doers. Asking Twitter for the accountability of celebrities is like asking it to place a warning label on its pages.
