Social Media as a Powerful New Communication Tool

Information is power, and communication is the art of transmitting information effectively for the empowerment of society. Media as a tool plays an important role in communication.

The media in its current form has broadly evolved over three phases: traditional media, mainstream media of the 20th century, and the emerging social media of the 21st century.

 

Traditional Media in India 

Traditional media was very popular at a time when there was no television, cinema, or printed newspapers and magazines. The foremost feature of traditional media was that it was based on interpersonal communication. It was people to people, and the performers travelled from place to place to entertain and educate audiences. Traditional media comprised four segments.

 

Folk Theatre

Folk theatre was the primary mode of entertainment in Indian villages and small towns, and was patronized by city dwellers as well. Jathra of West Bengal, tamasha of Maharashtra, bhavai of Gujarat, nautanki of Uttar Pradesh, Punjab and Haryana, ramlila of north India during Dussehra, yakshagana of Karnataka, karagattam and therukkoothu of Tamil Nadu, and theyyam and kathaprasangam of Kerala were some of the popular folk theatre forms.

Folk Songs

Bhakti songs, ceremonial songs, and tribal songs were prominent among folk songs. Villadichan pattu of Kerala can be included in this segment. 

 

Narrative Forms

Then there were the narrative forms, mainly with religious content. Harikatha was among the forms in Kerala that was generally staged in the temples during festivals.

 

Puppetry

There are several types of puppets such as string puppets, rod puppets, and shadow puppets. Troupes used to travel around the country during festivals and give performances. India has a rich tradition of puppetry.

Many of the traditional media forms now face extinction. A few survive only on state support. Some artists are promoted by tourism departments, but this type of promotion rather diminishes the worth of the art as it is not appreciated or remembered as part of one’s culture and instead is treated as a form of exotic entertainment.

 

Mainstream Media of 20th Century

With the advent of print media, cinema, radio and television, and the Internet, traditional media lost popular patronage. The novelty of the new media and the fact that they were available within the home hastened the decline of traditional media.

 

Print Media

The print media held sway in the century gone by. Newspapers and magazines were very influential and provided maximum jobs for media professionals. Newspapers sell millions of copies daily.

 

Radio

There was a time when radio was a powerful medium. It was a major source of news and entertainment for many years, but suffered a decline after the advent of television. However, radio made a comeback with FM radio. Once the radio was played mainly within the house, but there it was replaced by television. When the number of people who drove to work surged, listening to the radio while driving became popular, and FM stations put together a peppy mix of music, news, and other programmes for their growing audience. FM radio has even had an impact on language, as the style adopted is conversational, and the local language is often peppered with English.

 

Cinema

India continues to be the producer of the largest number of movies. Indian films continue to be popular despite the reach of television. In fact, instead of being a competitor, television has now come to support cinema as many channels pay hefty amounts for rights to telecast movies.

 

Television

In the beginning, state-owned Doordarshan had a monopoly over TV in India. Now a vibrant private television industry drives the sector and often sets the agenda for news and other programmes. There are at least 700 TV channels in India today.

 

Internet

With the advent of online newspapers, print media in the West went into decline. The website newspaperlayoffs.com gives an annual list of newspapers that closed down in the United States. Some newspapers have switched exclusively to online editions. While this is yet to happen in India so far, a new trend that is visible on the Indian scene is the slow rise of online newspapers, such as firstpost.com, niticentral.com, and thenewsminute.com. Online papers have the advantage that they can be constantly updated. All major Indian newspapers, therefore, have online editions now as they try to attract readers with the latest news. 

In the late-20th century, it seemed that online media was pushing out print media. The tech-savvy young generation began depending more and more on online newspapers to keep abreast of happenings. Subsequently, cash-rich online companies began diversifying into other businesses, including print media. In mid-2013, billionaire Jeff Bezos, founder of amazon.com, paid USD 250 million for The Washington Post and several smaller newspapers.

 

Social Media Enters the Scene

Social media has been defined as a “platform whereby content and applications are no longer created and published by individuals, but instead are continuously modified by all users in a participatory and collaborative fashion.” As the Internet gained currency, particularly among the younger generation, personal web pages, reference works like the Encyclopedia Britannica Online, and the idea of content publishing became popular. Then, more interactive blogs and wikis emerged. As social media evolved further, it allowed the creation and exchange of user-generated content.

It can be said that rudimentary social media made its appearance in 2000 when Open Diary, that allowed people who noted down personal experiences to get together online as one community, became popular (it is not possible to set an exact date to it, though). At about the same time, the term web log (logging on the Web) came into being. This noun was split into two words and used as a verb by some members of the online community, and “web log” became “we blog,” thus giving rise to the new terms “blog” and “blogging.”

A first milestone in social media was the launch of MySpace, a social networking site. Then came Orkut (of Google) in 2004, which grew in popularity so fast that in some of the Middle Eastern countries it was briefly banned as the authorities thought it promoted fissiparous tendencies. However, it was the advent of Facebook in 2004 that gave social media a kickstart. Facebook’s story needs to be told as it changed the social media scene as nothing else did.

 

Facebook

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, born in 1984, was a whiz in coding and writing software. When he was only 12, he wrote a messaging program that he named “Zucknet.” His father, Edward Zuckerberg, a tech-savvy dentist, used the program in his office, so that the receptionist could inform him of a new patient quietly, without shouting across the room. The family also used Zucknet to communicate with each other within the house. 

After graduation in 2002, Zuckerberg enrolled at Harvard University. By his second year at the university, he had made a name in software development. During this period, one of the programs that he made—Facemash—became immensely popular. Facemash compared the pictures of two students on campus, and other students could vote to decide which one was more attractive. Despite the popularity of Facemash, it was banned by the university administration, which thought it was inappropriate.

A student of Indian origin, Divya Narendra, and twins Cameron and Tyler Windlevoss were then working on an idea for a networking site for students of Harvard. It was called Harvard Connection, and they sought out Zuckerberg to develop it further. But after the initial association, Zuckerberg dropped out of Harvard to develop it independently and launched Facebook in 2004. When Facebook became popular, Divya and the twins dragged Zuckerberg to court saying he was using their idea, and after some litigation, Zuckerberg settled the dispute, making an initial payment of USD 65 million to his former associates. In May 2013, Facebook made the Fortune 500 list for the first time, making 28-year-old Zuckerberg the youngest Chief Executive Officer on the list. He has pledged 50 per cent, if not more, of his wealth for charity.

In February 2014, Facebook bought the world’s biggest messaging service Whatsapp for a whopping USD 19 billion. The free service Whatsapp had already severely dented revenues of the telecom companies which earned USD 120 billion from text messaging in 2013. Facebook’s plans to introduce voice calls through Whatsapp will have far reaching consequences for the business as well as promoting the concept of cheap international communication.

 

Twitter

Twitter, an online social networking and microblogging service, was created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey, Evan Williams, Biz Stone, and Noah Glass, and by July 2006, the site was launched. Initially, doubts were expressed as to the potential of the service but Twitter rapidly gained worldwide popularity, with 500 million registered users in 2012, who posted 340 million tweets per day. Dorsey also owns Square, which provides software and devices that allow users to process credit- and debit-card payments. Square has also turned into a money spinner for its inventor.

Twitter enables users to send and read “tweets,” which are text messages limited to 140 characters. Registered users can read and post tweets, but unregistered users can only read them. Users access Twitter through the website interface, SMS, or mobile device applications.

YouTube

YouTube was launched in 2005 by Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim, who were all early employees of PayPal. Later, in 2006 it was bought by Google. YouTube is a video-sharing website where users can upload, view, and share videos. It uses several applications to display a wide variety of user-generated video content, including video clips, TV clips, and music videos. YouTube is today the third most visited site after Google and Facebook. YouTube is used to project an idea, promote a book, or popularise an artist as well as for educative purposes and for entertainment. This author has used a YouTube trailer to popularise his novel Desert Hunt. SlideShare is similar to YouTube but uploads PowerPoint presentations. You can share books at Bookcrossing or share images at Flickr.

 

Linked in

LinkedIn, a resume-sharing website, was founded by Reid Hoffman who formally launched it in 2003. This networking site for professionals is now immensely popular, and a large number of employers worldwide are now looking at LinkedIn for recruiting suitable candidates. It has millions of registered users worldwide in several languages. More than anything else, it has globalised the recruitment process.

 

Google

Larry Page and Sergei Brin, two computer software professionals, met at Stanford as PhD students in 1995, and the rest is history. They launched Google in 1998 as a company with the motto “to organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” Interestingly, the name was derived from googol, a mathematical term denoting a number 1 followed by 100 zeros. And Google is indeed today the source for infinite information.

The two had also launched the then popular social networking site Orkut in 2004, which did not survive the competition from Facebook. However, Google then came up with many new ventures, such as Gmail, Google Earth, Google Drive and Google Translate. Google, like many other software giants, has a strong presence in India. As mentioned earlier, YouTube also belongs to Google.

 

Impact of Social Media

• Social media has introduced the common man into the media scene. His voice can now be heard in political, economic, and social discourses.

• Anyone can chat, share photos, upload links, post comments, or search for friends. Sharing, sending greetings on occasions, or congratulating somebody has become much easier. In this way, it has brought people closer.

• Aware of social media’s power, some politicians have tried to restrict it, while others have used it to their advantage. Unlike mainstream media, banning social media is easier said than done.

• Facebook has connected the world in a way it has never been connected before. People can now see and read and listen to the creation of another person anywhere in the world. They can also learn of the atrocities of rulers in other nations and the struggles of those fighting for a better life. People can support resistance movements across boundaries. It was through social network outlets such as Facebook and Twitter that the recent protest movements in Tunisia and Egypt caught global attention. These led to the eventual fall of Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali of Tunisia and Hosni Mubarak of Egypt. This was something unimaginable a decade ago.

• Often it is assumed that it is the young generation which is addicted to Facebook and other social media. However, some statistics show that the fastest growing segment on Facebook is women in the age group of 55–65 years.

• Statistics show that one out of eight people married in the United States in 2012 after getting to know each other via social media.

• It took radio 38 years to reach 50 million users, television 13 years, and the Internet 4 years. But Facebook added 100 million users in less than nine months.

• A 2009 study in the United States showed that online students outperformed those getting face-to-face instruction. One in six higher course students are enrolled online.

• Eighty per cent of companies in the United States use LinkedIn for recruitment. 

• People widely use Twitter to exchange ideas and opinion and information minute-to-minute. Politicians effectively use tweets as press releases as an increasing number of reporters monitor Twitter for news.

• Social media is now an integral part of many people’s personal lives. People are so glued to social media that terms like Facebook addict have gained currency. Many depend on social media like Facebook for interpersonal communication.

• Personal lives are no longer private. People are more than willing to upload personal details like photos on social media. The youth should be aware of the potential for abuse of the information they upload. Even as social media allows people anywhere in the world to interact with each other at any time and reach out to new friends, it exposes them to new dangers. Facebook has gone on record that close to 10 per cent of its members had fake identities.

• Social media has become an essential part of one’s professional life. It is now almost mandatory for authors, journalists, politicians, and other intellectuals to have a blog to share their ideas. There are more than 200 million blogs.

• Politicians use social media extensively. Obama’s election campaign was driven partly by social media. So is Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi’s. Modi’s decision to give an interview on Facebook has been widely discussed. The mainstream media will have to pick up the interview from social media.

• Social media revelations have resulted in solving crimes. Some criminals boast about their escapades on social media networks like Facebook, which then leads to their arrest and investigation.

• Business houses use social media for marketing. Podcasts are also used to communicate with people at large. New launches of products are made on social media. How this will evolve and how this will affect the ad revenues of mainstream media are to be closely watched.

• As many as 35 per cent book sales of Amazon are online on Kindle. Online sales already form a substantial part of revenue for many companies.

• We no longer search for news; the news finds us. Similarly, products will also find us in the near future.

• Tweeting and messaging are influencing the way language is written. Words are compressed to meet tweeting and messaging requirements, and how this will impact language remains to be seen.

• Social media, however, has further cut face-to-face communication, particularly within the family. The younger generation is becoming lost in the virtual world, and this situation is further aggravated when the parents also get too involved in social media. It may impact the emotional development of young minds, an aspect which needs to be studied.

• The job profile of journalism and communication students is changing drastically. Until recently, computer proficiency would have been enough, but the changing technological requirements of the emerging media may now decide what it takes to be in the profession.

“Social media is no longer a fad, it is a fact. It is a fundamental shift in the way we communicate.” It has brought in another communication revolution. Where once mass media communication was mainly one-way and was usually controlled by certain groups or special interests, social media allows mass communication to be interactive. In a way, it has democratised the media. Anyone can upload their thoughts, opinions, and suggestions, and communicate to a wider audience through a blog, Facebook, or Twitter. Social media has challenged the monopoly and supremacy of mainstream media, forcing them to sit up and take note of the many voices that have emerged.

What direction these communication tools will take is beyond prediction. As much of the Net operations get compressed into the mobile, the ordinary man or woman has these tools in the palm of his hand. That will certainly influence the shape of things to come, in a way it never did before.