The Qualities and Potential of Social Media

Author(s):  
Udo Richard Averweg ◽  
Marcus Leaning

In recent years social media have been clearly identified as playing a significant part in facilitating, if not causing a number of political revolutions and unexpected election results. Similarly, social media has also been considered as a way to improve organizational performance. In business and management, social media is seen as a way to empower customers and users, improve service levels through feedback loops, and generally offer an improved service users' experience of bureaucracy. In this chapter, the qualities and potential of social media can be understood to cause social change are examined. First in the background discussion to social media, new technologies are discussed. Then the four key areas of the characteristics of social media (the contemporaneity of communications, productive audiences, its dialogical and network nature, and its searchable and “taggable” nature) are explored. Finally, a number of possible trends in social media development and extrapolation are identified. From these (the self-leveraging network, deeper personal profiles and the Universal ID and identity, and hyper locality), they are extrapolated to the future.

Author(s):  
Udo Richard Averweg ◽  
Marcus Leaning

In recent years social media have been clearly identified as playing a significant part in facilitating, if not causing a number of political revolutions and unexpected election results. Similarly social media ha also been considered as a way to improve organisational performance. In business and management social media is seen as a way to empower customers and users, improve service levels through feedback loops and generally offer an improved service users' experience of bureaucracy. In this article the qualities and potential of social media can be understood to cause social change are examined. First in the background discussion to social media, new technologies are discussed. Then the four key areas of the characteristics of social media (the contemporaneity of communications; productive audiences; its dialogical and network nature; and its searchable and ‘taggable' nature) are explored. Finally, a number of possible trends in social media development and extrapolate are identified. From these (the self leveraging network; deeper personal profiles and the Universal ID and identity; and hyper locality) they are extrapolated to the future.


2014 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
pp. 40-41
Author(s):  
James LoRusso

This piece argues that new technologies generally, and social media in particular, are too often accepted uncritically and incorporated hastily into course designs for the humanities. The author encourages teachers to ask two basic questions when considering social media in the classroom: 1. Does social media actually improve the learning process? And 2. How are these technologies embedded in the larger socio-economic context?


2018 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 69-80
Author(s):  
Wildan Imaduddin Muhammad

This article analyzes the product of Salman Harun's Qur'anic  interpretation with  Facebook  as the medium. As one of the senior professors who pursue the field of interpretation, he has managed to follow the times by utilizing internet technology. There are two focus areas in the study; the first aspect of the sense of Indonesian tafsir attached to the self of Salman Harun, the two aspects of the novelty of discourse that became the basic character of social media. Both aspects are interesting to be studied with a hermeneutic approach. Given that  the  methodological problem that often arises from the hermeneutic approach is the context of the interpreter that is difficult to trace accurately, then this article finds its relevance to the case of Salman Harun's interpretation which uses the facebook media as the actualization of its interpretation product.


Author(s):  
Giandomenico Di Domenico ◽  
Annamaria Tuan ◽  
Marco Visentin

AbstractIn the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, unprecedent amounts of fake news and hoax spread on social media. In particular, conspiracy theories argued on the effect of specific new technologies like 5G and misinformation tarnished the reputation of brands like Huawei. Language plays a crucial role in understanding the motivational determinants of social media users in sharing misinformation, as people extract meaning from information based on their discursive resources and their skillset. In this paper, we analyze textual and non-textual cues from a panel of 4923 tweets containing the hashtags #5G and #Huawei during the first week of May 2020, when several countries were still adopting lockdown measures, to determine whether or not a tweet is retweeted and, if so, how much it is retweeted. Overall, through traditional logistic regression and machine learning, we found different effects of the textual and non-textual cues on the retweeting of a tweet and on its ability to accumulate retweets. In particular, the presence of misinformation plays an interesting role in spreading the tweet on the network. More importantly, the relative influence of the cues suggests that Twitter users actually read a tweet but not necessarily they understand or critically evaluate it before deciding to share it on the social media platform.


Human Affairs ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 40-45
Author(s):  
Leandro Gaitán

Abstract In a future highly technological society it will be possible to modify the personality using different kinds of technological tools. Consequently, we could become buyers and consumers of personality. As such, personality, which is a core aspect of the self, could turn into a commodity. This article intends to address the following questions: 1) How can new technologies modify personality? 2) Why might personality become a commodity? 3) What is wrong with turning personality into commodity?


2014 ◽  
Vol 14 (4) ◽  
pp. 541-554 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Scourfield

The idea of ‘co-production’ has been promoted by both New Labour and Coalition governments as a means to help ‘transform’ adult social care. With its emphasis on active citizenship, community support networks, voluntary effort and power sharing, the idea might have been expected to have been received more enthusiastically by those expected to put it into practice and benefit from it. However, unlike other ‘big ideas’ intended to ‘transform’ adult social care, such as ‘personal budgets’, co-production has gained comparatively little traction with either local authorities or service users. Despite the publication of much promotional literature in recent years, co-production has not yet become a significant part of either official or lay discourse on adult social care. It is concluded that apart from definitional problems and conceptual ambiguity, the inability of successive governments to effectively deploy common techniques of meta-governance might also be contributory factors to its sluggish take up.


Author(s):  
Zemfira K. Salamova ◽  

Social media has contributed to the spread of fashion, style or lifestyle blogging around the world. This study focuses on self-presentation strategies of Russian-speaking fashion bloggers. Its objects are Instagram accounts and YouTube channels of two Russian fashion bloggers: Alexander Rogov and Karina Nigay. The study also observes their appearances as guests in various interview shows on YouTube. Alexander Rogov received his initial fame through his television projects. Karina Nigay achieved popularity online on YouTube and Instagram, therefore she is a “pure” example of Internet celebritiy, whose rise to fame took place on the Internet. The article includes the following objectives 1) to study the self-branding of fashion bloggers on various online platforms; 2) to analyze the construction of fashion bloggers’ expert positions and its role in their personal brands. Turning to fashion blogging allows us to consider how its representatives build their personal brands and establish themselves as experts in the field of fashion and style in Russianlanguage social media.


2014 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 209-228
Author(s):  
Anita Kasabova

Abstract How the self perceives reality is a traditional topic of research across several disciplines. I examine the perceived self on Facebook, as a case-study of self-knowledge on „classical” social media. Following Blascovich & Bailenson (2011), I consider the distinction between the real and the virtual as relative. Perceptual self-knowledge, filtered through social media, requires rethinking the perceived self in terms of social reality (Neisser, 1993). This claim dovetails Jenkins’s (2013) notion of the self as an active participant in consumption. I argue that the perceived self in social media could be conceived in terms of how it would like to be perceived and appraised by its virtual audience. Using Neisser’s (1993) typology of self-knowledge and Castañeda’s (1983) theory of I-guises, I analyse seven samples from Anglo-American and Bulgarian Facebook sites and show that the perceived self produces itself online as a captivating presence with a credible story. My samples are taken from FB community pages with negligible cultural differences across an online teenage/twens (twixter) age group. I then discuss some problematic aspects of the perceived self online, as well as recent critiques of technoconsumerism.


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