"Do you have Facebook?"
"Yes, of course. But I don't think you can find me, as there are
too many people who have the same name as me. Try searching with my
surname as well."
"Hey, you celebrated your birthday in K-Box, right? I saw the photos in your Facebook."
"Bro, I saw your comments about the YouTube video that I've
posted in my blog. I'm happy that you are also deeply moved by the
'Dancing Peacock Man' as well."
Social media or "social
networking" has almost become part of our daily lives and being tossed
around over the past few years. It is like any other media such as
newspaper, radio and television but it is far more than just about
sharing information and ideas. Social networking tools like Twitter,
Facebook, Flickr and Blogs have facilitated creation and exchange of
ideas so quickly and widely than the conventional media. The power of
define and control a brand is shifting from corporations and
institutions to individuals and communities. It is no longer on the 5Cs
(e.g. condominium, credit cards and car) that Singaporeans once talked
about. Today, it is about the brand new Cs: creativity, communication,
connection, creation (of new ideas and products), community (of shared
interests), collaboration and (changing the game of) competition.
In
January 2010, InSites Consulting has conducted an online survey with
2,884 consumers from over 14 countries between the ages of 18 to 55
years old on social networking. More than 90% of participants know at
least 1 social networking site and 72% of participants are members of at
least 1 social networking site. On the average, people have about 195
friends and they log in twice a day to social networking sites. However,
55% of the users cannot access their social network websites at work.
In the past, not many adults were able to make more than 500 friends,
but with social media, even a child or teenager can get to know more
than 500 people in a few days by just clicking the mouse. Social media
has devalued the traditional definition of "friend" where it means
trust, support, compatible values, etc. Although we get to know more
people, we are not able to build strong bond with all the people whom we
met as our available time is limited. Hence, there is an upcoming
social trend of people with wider social circles, but weaker ties
(people we don't know very well but who provide us with useful
information and ideas).
Social media also influences people's
buying behaviours. Digital Influence Group reported that 91% of the
people say consumer reviews are the #1 aid to buying decisions and 87%
trust a friend's recommendation over critic's review. It is thrice more
likely to trust peer opinions over advertising for purchasing decisions.
1 word-of-mouth conversation has an impact of 200 TV ads. With the
prevalence use of social media, there is numerous news related to it
from the most viewed YouTube video on "Armless pianist wins 'China's Got
Talent'" to Web-assisted suicide cases (e.g. New Jersey college student
who killed himself after video of him in a sexual encounter with
another man was posted online). Thus, does social networking make us
better or worse off as a society?
Positive Effects of Social Media
Besides
having opportunity to know a lot of people in a fast and easy way,
social media also helped teenagers who have social or physical mobility
restrictions to build and maintain relationships with their friends and
families. Children who go overseas to study can still stay in meaningful
contact with their parents. To a greater extend, there is anecdotal
evidence of positive outcomes from these technologies.
In 2008,
President-elected Obama won the election through the effective use of
social media to reach millions of audience or voters. The Obama campaign
had generated and distributed huge amount of contents and messages
across email, SMS, social media platforms and their websites. Obama and
his campaign team fully understood the fundamental social need that
everyone shares - the need of being "who we are". Therefore, the
campaign sent the message as "Because It's about YOU" and chose the
right form of media to connect with individuals, call for actions and
create community for a social movement. They encouraged citizens to
share their voices, hold discussion parties in houses and run their own
campaign meetings. It truly changed the delivery of political message.
Obama
campaign had made 5 million "friends" on more than 15 social networking
sites (3 million friends on Facebook itself) and posted nearly 2,000
YouTube videos which were watched over 80 million times. At its peak,
their website, MyBarackObama.com, had 8.5 million monthly visitors and
produced 400,000 blog posts. In order to ensure that their contents were
found by people, the Obama campaign spent $3.5 million on Google search
in October alone, $600,000 on Advertising.com, $467,000 on Facebook in
2008, etc. Currently, Obama's Twitter account has close to 6 million
followers.
In 2010, after the earthquake happened in Haiti, many
of the official communication lines were down. The rest of the world was
not able to grasp the full picture of the situation there. To
facilitate the sharing of information and make up for the lack of
information, social media came in very handy to report the news about
the affected area on what happened and what help was needed. Tweets from
many people provided an impressive overview of the ongoing events from
the earthquake. BBC covered the event by combining tweets from the work
of its reporter Matthew Price in Port-au-Prince at the ground.
Guardian's live blog also used social media together with the
information from other news organisations to report about the rescue
mission.
It has been two years since CNN officially launched
iReport as a section of its website where people can upload video
material, with contact information. During the Haiti crisis, CNN had
published a range of social media material but not all the materials
were verified. The editorial staff would vet the reports from the
citizen journalists and labeled them differently compared to unverified
contents. On Facebook, a group, named "Earthquake Haiti", was formed to
show support and share updates and news. It had more than 14,000 members
and some users even pleaded for assistance to the injured Haitians in
the group. Using email, Twitter and social networking sites like
Facebook, thousands of volunteers as part of Project Ushahidi were able
to map reports sent by people from Haiti.
The most impressive part
of the social media's impact on Haiti is the charity text-message
donations that soared to over $10 million for the victims in Haiti.
People interested in helping the victims are encouraged to text, tweet
and publicize their support using various social networking sites. The
Global Philanthropy Group had also started a campaign to ask wealthy
people and celebrities, like Ben Stiller and John Legend to use Twitter
and Facebook to encourage others to give to UNICEF. An aid worker,
Saundra Schimmelpfennig, allowed the advice from other aid workers and
donors to post on her blog regarding to choosing which charitable
organisations to support. In the meantime, donors were asking questions
in Twitter, Facebook and blogs about their donations and endorsements of
their favourite charities. After every crisis, the social media for
social cause becomes a more effective medium to spread the word.
Negative Effects of Social Media
There
are always two sides of every coin. Social media is just a tool or mean
for people to use. It is still up to the users on how to use this tool
(just like a knife, can help you to cut food or hurt others). Pew
Research Center's Internet & American Life Project and Elon
University's Imagining the Internet Center conducted a study on "The
Future of Online Socializing" from the highly engaged, diverse set of
respondents to an online, opt-in survey consisted of 895 technology
stakeholders and critics. The negative effects presented by the
respondents included time spent online robs time from important
face-to-face relationships; the internet fosters mostly shallow
relationships; the act of leveraging the internet to engage in social
connection exposes private information; the internet allows people to
silo themselves, limiting their exposure to new ideas; and the internet
is being used to engender intolerance.
Some respondents also
highlighted that there will be development of some new psychological and
medical syndromes that will be "variations of depression caused by the
lack of meaningful quality relationships", and a "new world society".
The term, "Social Networking", has begun to deceive the users to believe
they are social creatures. For instance, spending a couple of hours
using Farmville and chatting with friends concurrently does not convert
into social skills. People become dependent on the technology and forget
how to socialise in face-to-face context. The online personality of a
person might be totally different from his/her offline character,
causing chaos when the two personalities meet. It is apparent in online
dating when the couple gets together in face-to-face for the first time.
Their written profiles do not clearly represent their real-life
characters. It is more enticing for people to type something that others
want to hear than saying the truth.
Besides the "friendship",
creators of social networking sites and users redefine the term,
"privacy" in the Internet as well. The challenge in data privacy is to
share data while protecting personally identifiable information. Almost
any information posted on social networking sites is permanent. Whenever
someone posts pictures or videos on the web, it becomes viral. When the
user deletes a video from his/her social network, someone might have
kept it and then posted it onto other sites like YouTube already. People
post photographs and video files on social networking sites without
thinking and the files can reappear at the worst possible time. In 2008,
a video of a group of ACJC students hazing a female student in school
on her birthday was circulated and another video of a SCDF recruit being
"welcomed" (was hosed with water and tarred with shoe polish) to a
local fire station made its way online.
Much news has been
reported about online privacy breach in Facebook and Facebook is
constantly revising their privacy policy and changing their privacy
controls for the users. Interestingly, even when users delete their
personal information and deactivate their Facebook account, Facebook
will still keep that information and will continue to use it for data
mining. A reporter asked whether the data will at least be anonymized.
The Facebook representative declined to comment.
In the corporate
world, human resource managers can access Facebook or MySpace to get to
know about a candidate's true colours, especially when job seekers do
not set their profiles to private. Research has found that almost half
of employers have rejected a potential worker after finding
incriminating material on their Facebook pages. Some employers have also
checked the candidates' online details in Facebook pages to see if they
are lying about their qualifications. Nowadays, younger generations
have a complete disregard for their own privacy, opening doors to
unwelcome predators or stalkers.