In this blog post, we take a closer look at how social media has changed and connected our lives beyond just a means of communication.
“Facebook was not created to be a company from the beginning. It was founded to fulfill its social mission of connecting the world in a more open and connected way.” These are the words of Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder and CEO, in the company’s IPO filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on February 1, 2012. As of 2024, Facebook is a leading social networking service (SNS) used by more than 3 billion people worldwide, excluding China, where the service is not available. In addition to Facebook, many other SNSs, such as Twitter and LinkedIn, are in service, and people turn to SNSs as soon as they wake up and fall asleep while looking at SNSs. Companies are enthusiastic about SNS marketing, and politicians are also trying to make good use of SNSs. What is social media, and why does it have such a deep impact on our lives and connect the world?
Social media refers to online services, platforms, or sites that allow people with common interests, activities, or backgrounds, or people who have met in real life, to come together to build and maintain social connections and relationships. Social networking services are composed of each user’s personal information, their social links, and various additional services. Social networking services are often used interchangeably with online community services, but strictly speaking, social networking services are personal-oriented services, which are different from online community services, which are group-oriented services. Social networking services allow users to share their thoughts, activities, events, interests, etc. through their personal networks.
Even social media, which is considered to have emerged relatively recently, already had its form in the mid-1990s when looking at its history. At that time, many social media sites such as AOL (America On-Line), GeoCities, sixDegrees.com, Friendster, MySpace, LinkedIn, Second Life, and South Korea’s Cyworld and iLoveSchool were competing with each other to become the mainstream of web-based social media. Then, with the emergence of Twitter and Facebook in 2006, all of them, except for LinkedIn, have been on the decline or are continuing to survive by providing other services such as games, media, and advertising. So, the current SNS market is a three-way competition between Twitter, which has the advantage of simplicity, allowing users to quickly and easily send short messages of 140 characters or less; Facebook, which has the largest number of users under its real-name system; and LinkedIn, which is a business-oriented SNS. So, how did Twitter and Facebook, which appeared late in the SNS market, manage to dominate the SNS market amid the proliferation of numerous SNS?
The reason why Twitter and Facebook were able to steal a large number of users from other social media is that they were well-adapted to the paradigm shift. First, they were well-adapted to the change in communication methods and led the way. In existing SNS, other users had to visit my space to see my posts and leave comments, whereas Twitter and Facebook aimed to provide a “microblog” service where all users linked to my posts could see and comment on them. And by using concise sentences, the timeline rotates quickly, allowing users to enjoy the effect of chatting. Second, unlike other SNS that mainly used web platforms, it was well adapted to changes in devices or media by making good use of mobile platforms such as smartphones that were becoming popular at the time. This allowed ordinary users to enjoy SNS anytime and anywhere without having to access the web, which inevitably increased their loyalty to the SNS. Third, there is no burden on users to use the service. In other words, it is designed to create added value just by users using SNS, and it is well adapted to the paradigm of modern society where networks become resources.
The biggest advantage of SNS is the rapid delivery of information. According to the “six-degrees-of-separation theory” (although the word “six-degrees-of-separation” is not used in Professor Stanley Milgram’s paper), which was made known through the paper “The Small World Problem” published by Professor Stanley Milgram of Harvard University’s Department of Psychology in 1967, when the relationship between two people who know each other is defined as a “link,” the average number of links connecting two random people is 5.2. In other words, I only need to go through six steps on average to communicate with a random person. Professor Stanley Milgram’s experiment was conducted through letters, but social media uses information and communication networks, so it is possible to communicate with a random person more quickly. This has narrowed the distance between me and celebrities, and it provides an opportunity to communicate with anyone if I want to. It is also possible to spread the information I create and post at a rapid pace.
When sharing information on social media, a kind of “like” mechanism is used. For example, on Facebook, there is a “Like” button, so if one of my friends “likes” the post I wrote, all of that person’s friends will be able to see it. Assuming that each person has about 200 friends, and assuming that 50 of them are mutual acquaintances, the post will be shared with 350 people at once. Twitter also allows you to quickly deliver information through a mechanism called RT (ReTweet). The difference is that Facebook is a horizontal relationship in which links are formed by mutual agreement to become friends, while Twitter is a vertical relationship in which you can only see the posts of people you follow and people you are followed by cannot see the posts of the people who follow them, so information spreads widely on Facebook but there is a greater chance that information will spread from the top to the bottom on Twitter. Therefore, Facebook is good for the transmission of information between acquaintances, while Twitter is good for the transmission of information about celebrities. However, both SNSs are developing their services in a way that accepts and complements each other’s strengths.
Thanks to the aforementioned empathy mechanism, SNSs have increased the influence of individuals and allowed them to share the same things and form a bond of empathy with people they don’t know. (For this reason, the current communist government of China is denying Facebook and Twitter services in China.) Moreover, the Facebook data team analyzed 2.2 billion friend relationships as of 2024, and the average number of links for Facebook users is 3.57, which means that the distance between two random people on social media has become even closer.
Usually, our human relationships form clusters. A cluster is simply a group or group of people with the same characteristics, and people who are linked by a link are likely to know each other. When people who know each other form a cluster through social media, they can easily contact people they have lost contact with and visually confirm the cluster they belong to. Another advantage of using social media is that you can maintain your relationships without much effort.
However, social media does not only have a positive impact on our society. The biggest problem is that privacy may not be protected. As shown in the aforementioned statistical data, the number of links between two random people on social media is 3.57 on average. This means that, on average, it only takes four people to access the information of any given person. This makes it easier to do so-called “identity theft” on the Internet. Users also tend to enter some of their personal information on social media, which is then easily disclosed and shared, sometimes inadvertently revealing information that they would rather keep hidden. This is especially true for information about one’s “relationship status.”
In addition, the spread of misinformation or rumors is also easy to occur because the influence of individuals increases through social media and the speed of information transmission is fast. In the summer of 2010, ahead of the holiday season, a false tweet was spread on Twitter that said, “If you have a heart attack, don’t panic for 10 seconds until you lose consciousness, and then take a deep breath while repeatedly coughing every two seconds. This will compress your heart, keep your blood circulating, and supply oxygen to your lungs, thereby saving your life.” In response, Professor Tae-ho Noh of the Department of Cardiology at Seoul St. Mary’s Hospital warned of the dangers of such false information, saying, “I am a professor of cardiology and teach cardiopulmonary resuscitation. Not only is it completely unsubstantiated, but it also wastes precious initial fluid.” As such, the spread of false information on social media can threaten our lives, so it is necessary for users to have the discernment to separate fact from fiction.
To solve the above problems, SNS allows users to set the scope of disclosure of personal information and posts, and takes measures such as imposing sanctions on false information or receiving help from the Cyber Investigation Department, but these measures are not perfect, so users must continue to make efforts to protect their personal information.
With the development of network theory and mobile devices, social networking services have become an inseparable part of our lives. New social networking services are emerging like mushrooms, and the age range of people using social networking services is expanding from children to the elderly, and the number of users is steadily increasing. However, it is also true that the social networking services industry is not achieving satisfactory results for its size. This is because they open their services to users for free and generate revenue mainly through advertising. Moreover, as the number of users using social media on mobile devices is increasing, the fact that they cannot provide advertisements to mobile users due to the small size of the liquid crystal display has exposed the vulnerability of their business. As the share price of Facebook, which once threatened Google, has halved, it is becoming increasingly clear that the value of the social media industry was a bubble. In addition, the number of users who are leaving because they do not find SNS as useful as new users is increasing, so the SNS industry is actually in a crisis. Now, the surviving SNS companies will have to keep looking for new ways to survive by learning from the fallen SNS companies. And in the process, SNS companies will require more personal information from users, so users themselves will have to continue to make efforts to protect their personal information.
