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Social Media

What Is Social Media?

Social media is a computer-based technology that facilitates the sharing of ideas, thoughts, and information through the building of virtual networks and communities. By design, social media is Internet-based and gives users quick electronic communication of content. Content includes personal information, documents, videos, and photos. Users engage with social media via a computer, tablet, or smartphone via web-based software or applications. While social media is ubiquitous in America and Europe, Asian countries like Indonesia lead the list of social media usage.1 More than 3.8 billion people use social media.

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Social media is a computer-based technology that facilitates the sharing of ideas, thoughts, and information through the building of virtual networks and communities. The largest social media networks include Facebook, Instagram, Twitter (X), YouTube, and TikTok. Social media typically features user-generated content and personalized profiles. By 2023, the number of social media users in the United States is forecast to increase to approximately 257 million. Quoted from: Dollarhide, M. (2021, August 31). Social media. Investopedia.


Social Media

The idea of social media began in the mid-to-late 1990s, when internet users were first given the ability to make their own websites through servers such as Geocities. Blogging and social networks also began around that time. Sixdegrees.com, launched in 1997, was one of the first websites that allowed users to create a profile and add lists of friends. It was not until 2002 and the launch of Friendster that the concept of a social network become highly popular. Within three months of its launch, Friendster had gained three million users. Other popular social media applications launched around this time include the social networking platforms MySpace and LinkedIn, the music service iTunes, and the image-hosting website Flickr.

Social media is classified in several ways. Any application that allows users to create a profile and build a friend list is considered a social network. The most popular example of this is Facebook, which was launched in 2004 and had grown to more than 1 billion daily active users by mid-2020. Blogs allow users to generate a variety of content for publication on the internet. Several websites are devoted to hosting users’ blogs; one of the most popular of these servers is WordPress. Forums are another classification that allows users to voice their opinion on a range of topics. Video and audio podcasts allow users to record themselves discussing different topics. Internet users can then download or stream these recordings. Collaborative websites known as "wikis," which allow users to generate informational content on a variety of topics, also became very popular; the most famous of these is Wikipedia, a crowdsourced encyclopedia. (Quoted from: Cooper, P. G. (2021). Social Media. Salem Press Encyclopedia)

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