Social media-

Social media are interactive technologies that facilitate

the creation, sharing and aggregation of content, ideas, interests, and other forms of expression
through virtual communities and networks.[1][2] Social media refer to new forms of media that
involve interactive participation. While challenges to the definition of social media arise[3][4] due to
the variety of stand-alone and built-in social media services currently available, there are some
common features:[2]

1. Social media apps are online platforms that enable users to create and share
content and participate in social networking.[2][5][6]
2. User-generated content—such as text posts or comments, digital
photos or videos, and data generated through all online interactions—is the
lifeblood of social media.[2][5]
3. Users create service-specific profiles for the website or app that are designed
and maintained by the social media organization.[2][7]
4. Social media helps the development of online social networks by connecting
a user's profile with those of other individuals or groups.[2][7]
The term social in regard to media suggests that platforms are user-centric and enable
communal activity. As such, social media can be viewed as online facilitators or enhancers of
human networks—webs of individuals who enhance social connectivity.[8]
Users usually access social media services through web-based apps on desktops or services
that offer social media functionality to their mobile devices (e.g. smartphones and tablets). As
users engage with these online services, they create highly interactive platforms in which
individuals, communities, and organizations can share, co-create, discuss, participate, and
modify user-generated or self-curated content posted online.[9][7][1] Additionally, social media are
used to document memories, learn about things and form friendships.[10] They may also be used
to promote people, companies and ideas.[10]
The change in relationship between humans and technology is the focus of the emerging field
of technoself studies.[11] Some of the most popular social media platforms, with more than 100
million registered users, include Twitter, Facebook (and its
associated Messenger), WeChat, ShareChat, Instagram (and its associated
app Threads), QZone, Weibo, VK, Tumblr, Baidu Tieba, and LinkedIn. Depending on
interpretation, other popular platforms that are sometimes referred to as social media services
include YouTube, Letterboxd, QQ, Quora, Telegram, WhatsApp, Signal, LINE, Snapchat, Pintere
st, Viber, Reddit, Discord, TikTok, Microsoft Teams, and more. Wikis are examples of
collaborative content creation.
Social media outlets differ from traditional media (e.g. print magazines and newspapers, TV,
and radio broadcasting) in many ways, including quality,[12] reach, frequency, usability, relevancy,
and permanence.[13] Additionally, social media outlets operate in a dialogic transmission system
(i.e., many sources to many receivers) while traditional media outlets operate under
a monologic transmission model (i.e., one source to many receivers). For instance, a newspaper
is delivered to many subscribers, and a radio station broadcasts the same programs to an entire
city.[14]
Since the dramatic expansion of the Internet, digital media or digital rhetoric can be used to
represent or identify a culture. Studying the rhetoric that exists in the digital environment has
become a crucial new process for many scholars.
Observers have noted a wide range of positive and negative impacts when it comes to the use of
social media. Social media can help to improve an individual's sense of connectedness with real
or online communities and can be an effective communication (or marketing) tool for
corporations, entrepreneurs, non-profit organizations, advocacy groups, political parties, and
governments. Observers have also seen that there has been a rise in social movements using
social media as a tool for communicating and organizing in times of political unrest.
Social media can also be used to read or share news, whether it is true or false.

History
See also: Timeline of social media

Early computing
The PLATO system was launched in 1960 after being developed at the University of Illinois and
subsequently commercially marketed by Control Data Corporation. It offered early forms of social
media features with 1973-era innovations such as Notes, PLATO's message-forum application;
TERM-talk, its instant-messaging feature; Talkomatic, perhaps the first online chat room; News
Report, a crowdsourced online newspaper, and blog and Access Lists, enabling the owner of a
note file or other application to limit access to a certain set of users, for example, only friends,
classmates, or co-workers.

IMP log for the first message sent over the Internet, using
ARPANET
ARPANET, which first came online in 1967, had by the late 1970s developed a rich cultural
exchange of non-government/business ideas and communication, as evidenced by the network
etiquette (or "netiquette") described in a 1982 handbook on computing at MIT's Artificial
Intelligence Laboratory.[15] ARPANET evolved into the Internet following the publication of the
first Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) specification, RFC 675 (Specification of Internet
Transmission Control Program), written by Vint Cerf, Yogen Dalal, and Carl Sunshine in 1974.
[16]
This became the foundation of Usenet, conceived by Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis in 1979 at
the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Duke University, and established in 1980.

A bulletin board system menu, featuring opinion polls and

a "Who's been on today?" query
A precursor of the electronic bulletin board system (BBS), known as Community Memory,
appeared by 1973. True electronic BBSs arrived with the Computer Bulletin Board System in
Chicago, which first came online on February 16, 1978. Before long, most major cities had more
than one BBS running on TRS-80, Apple II, Atari, IBM PC, Commodore 64, Sinclair, and
similar personal computers. The IBM PC was introduced in 1981, and subsequent models of
both Mac computers and PCs were used throughout the 1980s. Multiple modems, followed by
specialized telecommunication hardware, allowed many users to be online
simultaneously. CompuServe, Prodigy, and AOL were three of the largest BBS companies and
were the first to migrate to the Internet in the 1990s. Between the mid-1980s and the mid-1990s,
BBSes numbered in the tens of thousands in North America alone.[17] Message forums (a specific
structure of social media) arose with the BBS phenomenon throughout the 1980s and early
1990s. When the World Wide Web (WWW, or "the web") was added to the Internet in the mid-
1990s, message forums migrated to the web, becoming Internet forums, primarily due to cheaper
per-person access as well as the ability to handle far more people simultaneously than telco
modem banks.
Digital imaging and semiconductor image sensor technology facilitated the development and rise
of social media.[18] Advances in metal–oxide–semiconductor (MOS) semiconductor device
fabrication, reaching smaller micron and then sub-micron levels during the 1980s–1990s, led to
the development of the NMOS (n-type MOS) active-pixel sensor (APS) at Olympus in 1985,[19]
[20]
and then the complementary MOS (CMOS) active-pixel sensor (CMOS sensor) at NASA's Jet
Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in 1993.[19][21] CMOS sensors enabled the mass proliferation of digital
cameras and camera phones, which bolstered the rise of social media.[18]
Development of social-media platforms

SixDegrees, launched in 1997, is often regarded as the first

social media site.
In 1991, when Tim Berners-Lee integrated hypertext software with the Internet, he created
the World Wide Web, marking the beginning of the modern era of networked communication.
This breakthrough facilitated the formation of online communities and enabled support for offline
groups through the use of weblogs, list servers, and email services. The evolution of online
services progressed from serving as channels for networked communication to becoming
interactive platforms for networked social interaction with the advent of Web 2.0.[8]
Social media started in the mid-1990s with the invention of platforms
like GeoCities, Classmates.com, and SixDegrees.com.[22] While instant messaging and chat
clients existed at the time, SixDegrees was unique as it was the first online service designed for
real people to connect using their actual names. It boasted features like profiles, friends lists, and
school affiliations, making it "the very first social networking site" according to CBS News.[22]
[23]
The platform's name was inspired by the "six degrees of separation" concept, which suggests
that every person on the planet is just six connections away from everyone else.[24]
In the early 2000s, social media platforms gained widespread popularity with the likes
of Friendster and Myspace, followed by Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter, among others.[25]
Research from 2015 shows that the world spent 22% of their online time on social networks,
[26]
thus suggesting the popularity of social media platforms, likely fueled by the widespread
adoption of smartphones.[27] There are as many as 4.76 billion social media users in the
world[28] which, as of January 2023, equates to 59.4% of the total global population.

Definition and features

The idea that social media are defined simply by their ability to bring people together has been
seen as too broad, as this would suggest that fundamentally different technologies like
the telegraph and telephone are also social media.[29] The terminology is unclear, with some early
researchers referring to social media as social networks or social networking services in the mid-
2000s.[7] A more recent paper from 2015 reviewed the prominent literature in the area and
identified four common features unique to the then-current social media services:[2]

1. Web 2.0 Internet-based applications.[2][5]

2. User-generated content[2][5]
3. User-created self profiles[2][7]
4. Social network formed by connections between profiles,[2][7] such as followers or
groups
In 2019, Merriam-Webster defined social media as "forms of electronic communication (such as
websites for social networking and microblogging) through which users create online
communities to share information, ideas, personal messages, and other content (such as
videos)."[30]
While the variety of evolving stand-alone and built-in social media services makes it challenging
to define them,[2] marketing and social media experts broadly agree that social media includes the
following 13 types:[31]

 Blogs (ex. HuffPost, Boing Boing)

 Business networks (ex. LinkedIn, XING)
 Collaborative projects (ex. Mozilla)
 Enterprise social networks (ex. Yammer, Socialcast)
 Forums (ex. Gaia Online, IGN)
 Microblogs (ex. Twitter, Tumblr)
 Photo sharing (ex. Flickr, Photobucket)
 Products/services review (ex. Amazon, Upwork)
 Social bookmarking (ex. Delicious, Pinterest)
 Social gaming (ex. Mafia Wars, World of Warcraft)
 Social network sites (ex. Facebook, Google+)
 Video sharing (ex. YouTube, Vimeo)
 Virtual worlds (ex. Second Life, Twinity)
Some services of other social media subtypes (such as Twitter and YouTube) also allow users to
create a social network, and so are sometimes also included in the social network subtype.[7]