This blog post looks at how social media affects the way we communicate and society as a whole, and the importance and impact of social media through various examples.
In 2024, college student S’s day begins with a KakaoTalk notification from a friend asking him to show a difficult assignment. Mr. S, who forgot to do his assignment because he was chatting with his girlfriend on KakaoTalk until late last night, hurriedly accesses etl to check his assignment. Mr. S, who is in a hurry, accesses the Cyworld community and finds solutions posted by seniors to put out the fire. Mr. S, who feels much more relaxed, checks in on his hometown friends on Facebook on his way to school and reminisces about old memories. Even when he moves from one classroom to another, he keeps his smartphone in hand to check out the Twitter posts of his favorite singers. On his way home, he spends time playing social network games like Tiny Farm and Anipang, which he recently downloaded.
Social Network Service (SNS) is a collective term for services that enable social activities using networks such as the Internet or intranet. In a broad sense, social media refers to all media that enable two-way social communication, including comment services and bulletin board services that allow users to post comments on the Internet. However, with the development of mobile culture, services like Twitter and Facebook have become popular, and similar services are now commonly referred to as social media.
The two biggest features that distinguish social media from other network services are the existence of communities and the possibility of using it as a one-person media. This is a natural result of the nature of social media as a network-based social activity. The existence of communities provides a social context that is essential for social activities. For example, Facebook provides a community where individual opinions can be collected through a feature that automatically posts individual opinions on the wall. It also provides communities where anonymity can be guaranteed, such as groups and pages, enabling various social activities. However, simply ‘providing’ the function of a community is not enough. It can only function as a venue for social activities when a society is created in which relationships between a large number of users are built up and mesh communication is possible. For example, in the case of a school administration website like MySNU, users can post complaints or opinions on the bulletin board. However, this is mainly limited to a one-on-one Q&A level and does not facilitate communication between users. Therefore, MySNU can be said to not be an SNS service.
The fact that it can be used as a one-person media means that the subject of the social media is an individual, not a company that provides services or a large media outlet that provides information. For example, the comment section of an online news site meets the conditions of the aforementioned community. However, the impact of the opinions that individuals can post in the comment section of an online news site is usually much smaller than that of the article itself. However, in the case of social media services, each individual has an equal opportunity to speak, and there is no entity that has an effect beyond that of an individual’s speech.
These two characteristics – whether to emphasize the community or the function as a one-person media – are used to divide social media into two types, and the former is usually called Facebook-type and the latter is called Twitter-type according to the name of the representative service.
Although the term “social networking service” (SNS) began to be used after Twitter and Facebook became popular around the world, the concept actually began to take shape in the early days of the Internet. Traces of social services can be found even in early Internet services such as ALFANET and Usenet, which were mainly used for military purposes, and early Internet portals included bulletin board systems (BBS). It was practically functioning as a social network by providing community features through the back. This concept became more concrete as the Korean Cyworld and the American MySpace became popular in the late 1990s, and from then on, the concept of social activities on the network, which was not a term at the time, can be seen as having been established. However, the concept spread globally and gained the name “social media” when ubiquitous networking using smartphones became possible and Facebook became very popular worldwide.
The reason behind the popularity of social media is the fundamental human desire for communication. Humans, as social animals, have always considered communication as an interaction between people and as a thread that enables them to exist in a group. Therefore, communication technology has been one of the most important technologies since ancient times. The key to communication and communication technology lies in how well we can control the physical and social factors that hinder it. This is also the reason why social media is currently so popular. Social media almost completely removes physical and social factors from communication between users. Take Twitter, for example. We can freely exchange opinions with Hollywood’s top stars, who are on the other side of the world and who we may not actually have any contact with, through the means of Twitter. Even if a certain degree of real-name system has been introduced, anonymity still allows people to communicate freely without being constrained by various social factors such as age and status. It goes without saying that the development of devices such as smartphones has made it possible to access social media anytime, anywhere.
The impact of social media on modern society can be seen in various aspects of society. Let’s take the recent T24 Social Festival as an example. This event, which started as a controversy within an internet community about whether or not one person could set up a military-style 24-person tent, was amplified and reproduced through social media, and became a nationwide festival with thousands of people participating in person and hundreds of thousands of people expressing their opinions online. In addition, the Jasmine Revolution, which swept Islam and the Arab world into a wave of democratization, was also carried out using the grammar of social media rather than existing media that are easy to control. The advertising industry and others are already using social media as an active marketing tool, and many politicians are using social media as a new outlet for their opinions.
The explosive power of these social media comes from uncertainty. Since each individual acts as a one-person media, it is impossible to control them like in the case of traditional media. Therefore, the effects are also unpredictable. This is the biggest advantage of social media, but it is also its biggest disadvantage. This is because it is impossible to control the spread of information that should not be spread, such as privacy, or distorted information that is circulated as if it were true. In particular, recently, there have been frequent cases of individuals being accused of witchcraft, such as the numerous “XX-nyeo” incidents. To prevent this, many countries, including South Korea, have recently begun censoring social media, and there is much controversy between the freedom of speech and the government’s control over its proper use.
The actual economic impact of social media is also a highly controversial topic. As mentioned earlier, it is almost impossible to measure the economic impact of social media because its results are very difficult to predict. In addition, the way social media is operated requires the participation of many people, so many services are operated for free to attract users. Therefore, it is difficult to generate direct economic profits from social media, and it is even more difficult to accurately calculate them. In fact, KakaoTalk, the leading mobile social media service in Korea, is in the red every year despite having more than 10 million users, and is working hard to develop a revenue model to generate concrete economic effects.
So far, we have looked at what social media is, how it has grown, why it has become popular, and the social influence it has today. Although it is said to have started with the advent of the Internet, social media is still a relatively new concept and is still a growing medium. For this reason, social media is at the center of many controversies. However, even if we ignore these controversies, it is undeniable that social media has a huge impact on modern society and has a significant impact on people’s lives.
