11.3 Social Media and Web 2.0
Although GeoCities lost market share and theGlobe.com never really made it to the 21st century, social networking has persisted. Users have access to a wide range of social media platforms today, from social networking sites like Facebook to blogging services like WordPress. All these sites bring something different to the table, and a few of them even try to encompass nearly everything at once.
Social Networking
Social networking services—like Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), LinkedIn, TikTok, and Instagram—provide a limited but public platform for users to create a “profile.” This can range anywhere from the 280-character (that’s letters and spaces, not words) posts on X to the highly customizable MySpace, which allows users to blog, customize color schemes, add background images, and play music. Each of these services has its key demographic—MySpace, for example, is particularly geared toward younger users. As Internet technology evolves rapidly, most users have few qualms about moving to whichever site offers the better experience; they often have profiles and accounts on multiple services simultaneously. However, as relational networks become increasingly established and concentrated on a few social media sites, it becomes increasingly complex for newcomers and lagging challengers to offer the same rich networking experience. For an X user with hundreds of followers on their social network, switching to Threads and bringing along their entire network of friends seems like a daunting and infeasible prospect.
LinkedIn caters to business professionals looking for networking opportunities. LinkedIn offers free membership and allows users to post résumés and job qualifications (rather than astrological signs and favorite TV shows). Its tagline, “Relationships matter,” emphasizes the role of an increasingly networked world in business; just as a musician might use YouTube, Instagram, or TikTok to promote new music, a LinkedIn user can use the site to promote professional services. While these sites share similar structures, they serve different purposes for various social groups; the character of social networking depends heavily on the type of social circle.
X offers a different approach to social networking, allowing users to post 280-character messages to their “followers,” making it something of a hybrid of instant messaging and blogging. Users can openly search the platform, meaning anyone can visit the site and quickly find out what other X users have to say about any subject. X has proved helpful for journalists reporting on breaking news, as well as highlighting the “best of” the Internet. Businesses have also found X helpful in disseminating marketing messages at no cost. Facebook, initially deployed exclusively to Ivy League schools, has since opened its doors to anyone over 13 with an email account. With the explosion of the service and its massive growth among older demographics, “My parents joined Facebook” has become a common complaint (My Parents Joined Facebook).
Blogs represent another category of social media. They began as an online, public version of a diary or journal. Short for “web logs,” these personal sites give anyone a platform to write about anything they want to. Some services, like LiveJournal, highlight their ability to provide up-to-date reports on personal feelings, even adding a “mood” shorthand at the end of every post. The Blogger service (now owned by Google) allows users with Google accounts to follow friends’ blogs and post comments. WordPress.com, the company that created the open-source blogging platform WordPress.org, and LiveJournal both follow the freemium model by offering a basic selection of settings for free, with the option to upgrade for features like custom styles and photo hosting space. They all bundle social networking (such as the ability to link to and comment on friends’ blogs easily) with an expanded platform for self-expression. At this point, most traditional media companies have incorporated blogs, social media platforms, and other online tools to enable their reporters to update instantly and frequently. This form of media convergence, discussed in detail in Section 11.3, “The Effects of the Internet and Globalization on Popular Culture and Interpersonal Communication,” now constitutes a necessary part of doing business.
Users can find many other types of social media on the internet, including YouTube (video sharing), Wikipedia (an open-source encyclopedia composed of “wikis” that are editable by any user), Instagram (photo sharing), Snapchat (ephemeral messaging), and Tumblr (social news aggregation). Traditional media outlets have begun referring to these social media services and others like them as “Web 2.0,” which refers to the increased focus on user-generated content and social interaction on the web, as well as the evolution of online tools to facilitate that focus. Instead of relying on professional reporters to get information about a protest in Iran, a person could search for “Iran” on X and likely end up with hundreds of posts linking to everything from blogs to CNN to YouTube videos from Iranian citizens themselves. Additionally, many of these posts originate from individuals using X in Iran, offering instant updates on the situation. This allows people to receive information directly from the source, rather than having it filtered through news organizations or censored by governments.
Going Viral
In 2009, Susan Boyle, a middle-aged Scottish woman who was unemployed at the time, appeared on Britain’s Got Talent and sang “I Dreamed a Dream” from the musical Les Misérables, becoming an international star almost overnight. Her performance itself did not catapult her to fame; however, a subsequently released album of hers sent her to the top of the UK Billboard charts and kept it there for six weeks. A YouTube video of her performance garnered 87,000,000 views and counting (YouTube, 2009).
Media that spreads from person to person has “gone viral” if the content receives a large number of views, often in the millions, in a short period. Marketing and advertising agencies have deemed advertising that makes use of this phenomenon as “viral marketing.” Yet many YouTube sensations have not come from large marketing firms. For instance, the four-piece pop-punk band OK Go filmed a music video on a tiny budget for their song “Here It Goes Again” and released it exclusively on YouTube in 2006. Featuring a choreographed dance done on eight separate treadmills, the video quickly became a viral sensation and, as of May 2011, has over 7,265,825 views. The footage helped OK Go attract millions of new fans and earned them a Grammy award in 2007, making it one of the most notable successes of viral Internet marketing. Viral marketing, however, can prove notoriously unpredictable and liable to spawn remixes, spinoffs, and spoofs that can dilute or damage the intended messages of marketers. Yet, when it is successful, viral marketing can reach millions of people for very little money and can even secure legacy media coverage.
Successes and failures in viral marketing illustrate the challenges marketers face in controlling their message as it reaches the masses. In 2007, the band Radiohead released their album In Rainbows online, allowing fans to download it for any amount of money they chose, including for free. Despite practically giving the album away, the digital release of In Rainbows still pulled in more money than Radiohead’s previous album, Hail to the Thief. At the same time, the band simultaneously sold a massive number of $80 collector’s editions and continued to sell physical CDs months after the digital release became available (New Musical Express, 2008). In contrast, the food giant Healthy Choice enlisted Classymommy.com blogger Colleen Padilla to write a sponsored review of its product, leading to a featured New York Times article on the blogger (not the product), which gave the product only a passing mention (Joshi, 2009). Often, a successfully marketed product will reach some people through the Internet and then break through into the mainstream media. Yet as the article about Padilla shows, sometimes the person writing about the product overshadows the product itself.
Not all viral media consists of marketing, however. In 2007, someone posted a link to a new trailer for Grand Theft Auto IV on the video game message board of the web forum 4chan.org. When users followed the link, they did not find a video game trailer, but instead Rick Astley singing his 1987 hit, “Never Gonna Give You Up.” This technique—redirecting someone to that particular music video—became known as Rickrolling and quickly became one of the most well-known Internet memes of all time (Fox News, 2008). Memes spread rapidly online, capturing a cultural idea or image that often incorporates humorous or nonsensical elements. Another meme, “Lolcats,” consists of misspelled captions—e.g., “I can has cheezburger?”—over pictures of cats. Often, these memes take on a metatextual quality, such as the meme “Milhouse is not a meme,” in which the character Milhouse (from the TV show The Simpsons) is told that he is not a meme. Chronicling memes is notoriously difficult because they typically spring into existence seemingly overnight, propagate rapidly, and disappear before ever making it onto the radar of mainstream media, or even the mainstream Internet user.
Benefits and Problems of Social Media
On February 15, 2010, the firm Compete, which analyzes Internet traffic, reported that Facebook surpassed Google as the number one site to drive traffic to news and entertainment media on both Yahoo! and MSN (Ingram, 2010). This statistic provided the first indication that social networks would quickly become one of the most effective ways for people to sift through the ever-increasing amount of information on the Internet.
Social media allows an unprecedented volume of personal, informal communication in real-time from anywhere in the world. It allows users to keep in touch with friends on other continents, yet keeps the conversation as casual as a Facebook wall post. In addition, blogs allow people to gauge a wide variety of opinions and have given “breaking news” a whole new meaning. Now, many major outlets almost instantaneously distribute the news, and different perspectives on any one event can air concurrently. In addition, news organizations can harness bloggers as sources of real-time news, in effect outsourcing some of their news-gathering efforts to bystanders on the scene. Crowdsourcing refers to the practice of harnessing the efforts of several individuals online to solve a problem.
Additionally, news aggregators like Google News profit from linking to journalists’ stories at major newspapers and selling advertising, but they do not share these profits with the news organizations and journalists who created the stories. Some journalists struggle to keep pace with the nonstop news cycle’s immediacy, and as revenues for their efforts are diverted to news aggregators, journalists and news organizations increasingly lack the resources to maintain this fast pace. X presents a similar problem: Instead of getting news from a specific newspaper, many people read the articles they find linked in their feed. As a result, the news cycle leaves journalists no time for analysis or cross-examination. Increasingly, they will report, for example, on what a politician or public relations representative says without following up on these comments or verifying the facts. This further shortens the news cycle, making it much easier for government officials, public relations firms, and business leaders to exploit journalists.
Consequently, the very presence of blogs and their perceived importance, even among legacy media, has made some critics wary. The book The Cult of the Amateur by Internet entrepreneur Andrew Keen follows up on the famous thought experiment suggesting that infinite monkeys, given infinite typewriters, will one day randomly produce a great work of literature (Huxley): “In our Web 2.0 world, the typewriters aren’t quite typewriters, but rather networked personal computers, and the monkeys aren’t quite monkeys, but rather Internet users (Keen, 2007).” Keen also suggests that the Internet boils down to a case of my word against yours, where bloggers do not feel the need to back up their arguments with credible sources. “These days, kids can’t tell the difference between credible news by objective professional journalists and what they read on [a random website] (Keen, 2007).” Commentators like Keen worry that this trend will lead to young people’s inability to distinguish credible information from a mass of sources, eventually resulting in a sharp decline in their ability to identify credible sources of information.
For defenders of the Internet, this argument seems a bit overwrought: “A legitimate interest in the possible effects of significant technological change in our daily lives can inadvertently dovetail seamlessly into a ‘kids these days’ curmudgeonly sense of generational degeneration, which is hardly new (Downey, 2009).” Greg Downey, who runs the collaborative blog Neuroanthropology, says that fear of kids on the Internet—and social media in particular—can slip into “a ‘one-paranoia-fits-all’ approach to technological change.” For the argument that online experiences are “devoid of cohesive narrative and long-term significance,” Downey offers that, on the contrary, “far from evacuating narrative, some social networking sites might be said to cause users to ‘narrativize’ their experience, engaging with everyday life already with an eye toward how they will represent it on their pages.”
Another argument in favor of social media defies the warning that time spent on social networking sites destroys the social skills of young people. “The debasement of the word ‘friend’ by [Facebook’s] use of it should not make us assume that users can’t tell the difference between friends and Facebook ‘friends,’” writes Downey. On the contrary, social networks (like the Usenet of the past) can even provide a place for people with more obscure interests to meet one another and share commonalities. Additionally, social media provides opportunities for free marketing, making it a valuable tool for small businesses with limited promotional budgets. A community theater can invite all of its “fans” to a new play for less money than putting an ad in the newspaper, and this direct invitation feels far more personal and specific. Many people view services like X (formerly Twitter), with its concept of “followers,” as more semantically appropriate than the “friends” found on Facebook. Because of this, Twitter has, in many ways, changed the conception of social media. Rather than connecting with “friends,” Twitter transformed social media into a purely informational platform, thereby making it far more appealing to adults. In addition, while 280 characters may seem like a constraint to some, the time-strapped user looking to catch up on recent news can find the platform remarkably useful.
Social media’s detractors also point to the sheer banality of much of the conversation on the Internet. Again, Downey keeps this in perspective: “The banality of most conversation is also pretty frustrating,” he says. Downey suggests that many young people using social networking tools view them as just another aspect of communication. However, Downey warns that online bullying has the potential to pervade larger social networks while shielding perpetrators through anonymity.
The Internet’s many segmented communities hint at another downside: users tend to expose themselves only to information that interests them and opinions they support. This lack of exposure to novel ideas and contrary opinions can create or reinforce a lack of understanding among people with different beliefs, making political and social compromise more difficult to achieve.
Keen suggests some crucial arguments to consider regarding the effects of the web and social media in particular. The main concerns stem from two key issues: the potential for the volume of amateur, user-generated content online to overshadow more credible sources, and the media literacy skills of users to distinguish between high-quality and low-quality information sources.
Education, the Internet, and Social Media
Although Facebook began at Harvard University and quickly gained popularity among Ivy League colleges, critics have since lambasted the social network as a distraction for students. Instead of studying, the argument claims, students will sit in the library and browse Facebook, messaging their friends, and getting nothing done. Two doctoral candidates, Aryn Karpinski (Ohio State University) and Adam Duberstein (Ohio Dominican University), studied the effects of Facebook use on college students and found that students who use Facebook generally receive a full grade lower—a half point on the GPA scale—than students who do not (Hamilton, 2009). Correlation does not imply causation, though, as Karpinski said that Facebook users may just be “prone to distraction.”
On the other hand, students’ access to technology and the Internet may allow them to pursue their education to a greater degree than they could otherwise. It has become increasingly common for schools to issue laptops instead of textbooks, and some school buses now offer Wi-Fi Internet access. As a result, bus rides, including those of athletes participating in off-campus sporting events, provide opportunities for studying. Of course, the students had laptops long before their bus rides had Internet connections, but Wi-Fi technology has “transformed what was often a boisterous bus ride into a rolling study hall (Dillon, 2010).” Although not all students studied at all times, enabling students to work on bus rides fulfilled the school’s goal of extending educational hours beyond the usual 8 a.m. to 3 p.m.
Privacy Issues With Social Networking
Social networking offers unprecedented ways to stay in touch with friends, but this ability can sometimes lead to unintended negative consequences. Users can update friends with every latest achievement—“[insert name here] just won three straight games of solitaire!”—but may also unwittingly update their bosses and others from whom particular bits of information should remain hidden.
Social networks have rapidly eroded online privacy, and for a surprising reason: conscious decisions made by participants. Putting personal information online—even when granting access to only select friends—has become relatively standard. Dr. Kieron O’Hara studies privacy in social media and calls this era “intimacy 2.0 (Kleinman, 2010), a riff on the buzzword “Web 2.0.” O’Hara argues that the courts base legal issues of privacy on a “reasonable standard.” According to O’Hara, the excessive sharing of personal information on the Internet by some constitutes an offense to the privacy of all, because it lowers the “reasonable standard” that can be legally enforced. In other words, as cultural tendencies toward privacy degrade on the Internet, it affects not only the privacy of those who choose to share their information but also the privacy of those who do not.
From Profile to Public: The Evolving Battle for Privacy on Facebook
Facebook has a history of revisiting its privacy settings. With over 500 million users, it should not come as a surprise that Facebook serves as one of the primary battlegrounds for privacy concerns on the Internet. Sometimes, such battles would lead to impactful changes that added measures to safeguard private information.
When Facebook updated its privacy settings in 2009, The Guardian reported in late 2009 that “privacy groups including the American Civil Liberties Union…[called] the developments ‘flawed’ and ‘worrisome’” (Johnson, 2009). At the time, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg discussed privacy issues regularly in forums ranging from his official Facebook blog to conferences. At the Crunchies Awards in San Francisco in early 2010, Zuckerberg claimed that privacy was no longer a “social norm (Johnson, 2010).” This statement followed his company’s late-2009 decision to make public information sharing the default setting on Facebook. Whereas users previously could restrict public access to basic profile information, such as their names and friends, the new settings made this information publicly available with no option to make it private. Although Facebook publicly announced the changes, many outraged users first learned of the updates to the default privacy settings when they discovered—too late—that they had inadvertently broadcast private information. Facebook argued that the added complexity of the privacy settings gave users more control over their information. However, opponents countered that adding more complex privacy controls while simultaneously making public sharing the default setting for those controls appeared to be a blatant ploy to encourage casual users to share more of their information publicly—information that Facebook could then use to offer more targeted advertising (Bankston, 2009).
In response to the privacy policy, many users formed grassroots protest groups on Facebook. In response to critiques, Facebook revised its privacy policy again in May 2010, introducing three primary changes. First, they made privacy controls. Instead of various controls spread across multiple pages, users can now utilize a single, central control to determine who can view their information. Second, Facebook made less information publicly available by limiting public information to basic information, such as a user’s name and profile picture. Finally, Facebook made it easier to block applications and third-party websites from accessing user information (Lake, 2010).
Facebook replaced privacy settings with a collection of applications (written by third-party developers) that included everything from “Which American Idol Contestant Are You?” to an “Honesty Box” that allowed friends to send anonymous criticism. The disclaimer on the application installation page read: “Allowing Honesty Box access will let it pull your profile information, photos, your friends’ info, and other content that it requires to work.” The ACLU drew particular attention to the “app gap” that allowed “any quiz or application run by you to access information about you and your friends (Ozer, 2009).” In other words, merely using someone else’s Honesty Box gave the program information about a user’s “religion, sexual orientation, political affiliation, pictures, and groups (Ozer, 2009).” Unrelated applications may want to collect this information for various reasons, but selling products is at the top of the list. The more information marketers have, the better they can target a message, and the more likely the recipient will purchase the advertised good, idea, or service.
Social Media’s Effect on Commerce
Social media on the Internet has always been of interest to marketers. The ability to target advertising based on demographic information voluntarily provided to the service—such as age, political preference, gender, and location—allows marketers to target advertising extremely efficiently. However, by the time Facebook’s population passed the 350-million mark, marketers scrambled to harness social media. The increasingly difficult-to-reach younger demographic has mostly rejected legacy media outlets in favor of online content and streaming services. Increasingly, marketers turn to social networks as a way to reach these consumers. Culturally, these developments suggest a growing mistrust among consumers of traditional marketing techniques; marketers must now employ new and more personalized methods to reach consumers effectively if they wish to sell their products.
Marketers strive to identify the trend of “going viral” to garner millions of YouTube views, become a hot topic on Google Trends —a website that tracks the most frequently searched topics on the web —or even receive exposure from a famous influencer. For example, Procter & Gamble sent free samples of its Swiffer dust mop to stay-at-home-mom bloggers with a large online audience. And in 2008, the movie College (or College: The Movie) used its tagline “Best.Weekend.Ever.” as the prompt for a YouTube video contest, which invited contestants to submit videos of their best college weekend ever, with the winner receiving a monetary prize (Hickey, 2008).
Both instances of marketing approach people who already enjoy doing something—blogging or making movies—and offer them a relatively small amount of compensation for providing advertising. This differs from traditional advertising methods because marketers seek to bridge a credibility gap with consumers. Marketers have done this for ages, long before breakfast cereal slogans like “Kid Tested, Mother Approved” or “Mikey likes it” ever hit the airwaves. Now, however, the people pushing the products include friends or family members, all via social networks.
Facebook tried this in 2007 with a program called Beacon. With Beacon, a Facebook user had a choice to “share” an online purchase from partnering sites. For example, a user might buy a book from Amazon and check the corresponding “share” box during the checkout process. All of their friends would then receive a message notifying them that this person has purchased the book and recommends it to others. Explaining the reason for this shift in a New York Times article, Mark Zuckerberg said, “Nothing influences a person more than a trusted friend (Story, 2007).” However, many Facebook users did not want their purchasing information shared with other users on the platform. As a result, Facebook ended the service in 2009 and subsequently became the subject of a class action lawsuit. Facebook’s troubles with Beacon illustrate the fine line between leveraging the tremendous marketing potential of social media and violating user privacy.
The need to create reliable revenue streams motivated Facebook’s questionable alliance with marketers through Beacon. Social media companies behave like typical businesses, prioritizing efforts to increase profits. In the 1990s, Globe.com showed promise, but it failed almost as quickly due to a lack of funds. The lesson of the Globe.com has not gone unheeded by today’s social media services. For example, Twitter has sold access to its content to Google and Microsoft, allowing users’ tweets to be searchable for $25 million.
It remains to be seen whether social media companies’ efforts to maximize profits over the best interests of their consumers will transform the way people use their services. The uproar over Facebook’s Beacon highlights that the relationship between social media and advertising presents ample opportunities for controversy.
Beyond the Hashtag: The True Story of a Social Media Revolution
The use of Facebook and Twitter in the recent political uprisings in the Middle East, referred to as the Arab Spring, has brought to the fore the question of whether social media can instigate social change.
On January 14, 2011, after a month-long protest against fraud, economic crisis, and lack of political freedom, the Tunisian public ousted President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali. Shortly after the Tunisian rebellion, the Egyptian public expelled President Hosni Mubarak, who had ruled the country for 30 years. Almost immediately, other Middle Eastern countries, such as Algeria, Libya, Yemen, and Bahrain, also erupted in protests against their oppressive governments in the hopes of achieving political freedom (Gamba, 2011).
Social media played a critical role in all of those uprisings. In nearly all of these countries, the government had imposed restrictions on the press and brutally discouraged resistance (Beaumont, 2011). This has inspired the entire Middle East to organize online to rebel against tyrannical rule (Taylor, 2011). Protesters used social media not only to organize against their governments but also to share their struggles with the rest of the world (Gamba).
In Tunisia, protesters took to the streets, sharing information on Twitter (Taylor). Egypt’s protestors organized their demonstrations on Facebook pages and circulated the details on both Facebook and Twitter. They used e-mail to distribute the activists’ guide to challenging the regime (Beaumont). Libyan dissenters also spread the word about their demonstrations in a similar manner (Taylor).
Owing to the role played by Twitter and Facebook in helping protesters organize and communicate with each other, many have termed these rebellions as “Twitter Revolutions (Morozov, 2011)” or “Facebook Revolutions (Davis, 2011)” and have credited social media for helping to bring down these regimes (Beardsley, 2011).
During the unrest, social media outlets such as Facebook and Twitter helped protesters share information by communicating ideas continuously and instantaneously. Users took advantage of these unrestricted vehicles to share the most graphic details and images of the attacks on protesters, as well as to rally demonstrators (Beaumont). In other words, the use of social media has enabled communication across borders and barriers. It gave ordinary people a voice and an opportunity to express their opinions.
Critics of social media, however, argue that those labeling the Middle East movements as Facebook or Twitter revolutions tell an incomplete story (Villarreal, 2011). While social media provided vital assistance during the unrest in the Middle East, technology alone could not have brought about the revolutions. Critics say the resolve of the people to bring about change deserves the most recognition (Taylor).
