[MUSIC] Hi, and welcome back to the course. This is week six, and this week we're discussing social media. The emerging approaches to social media, theoretical perspectives, and practical implication. But before we move onto the theoretical part, I want to ask you a question. What is the first thing you do early in the morning? Well, first, you need to forget about the alarm, you finally woke up. What do you want to do next? For me, it would be my yoga practice. And what I really want to do is just stretch and get into this day. But usually instead, I would just go and scroll my Facebook feed line and then I see what happens overseas over this night. If it doesn't work, I go on Instagram and check on the pictures that have been uploaded. Again eight hours from me, because in the United States, for example, while I was sleeping was brand new day. So even if I finally decided to do my yoga in this morning, I would go in YouTube and find my instructor who has shown me some postures, gestures and definitely wish me a great day. So social media becomes an essential part of our life. And it's integrated with our day routine from the very early morning. But let's take a look what social media is. Well, by the definition it's a group of Internet-based applications that are built on the ideological and technological foundations of Web 2.0, and that allow the creation and exchange of user generated content. The most important part for us is user generated content. Social media appear online in early 2000s. And by the year 2015, it was just 15 years, over 200 operating social media website appeared online. What are the examples of these social media? First of all, it all started with blogs and User Generated Content was provided there. What do you want to share with publics? Do you want to tell your lifestyle story? Do you want to share some experiences of yours that happen before? Would you like to discuss some political or social issues? You can do it on blog. This is a very personalized page where you can share your own ideas. While secondly, it's microblogs, hello Twitter. Here, we can share some ideas, very short and brief ones. While definitely Twitter is taken a part in our political and social agenda, we track the use of celebrities and politicians over the Twitter. We try to track the life of others over the Twitter because we are interested exactly in this content and in the news updates. Social networks created the revolution in social media. And Facebook nowadays is one of the most often downloaded applications, as well as one of the most opened websites among the people. And well, what do you do the first thing you come to the work? You open your Facebook page and check on the news. And then you can get your cup of your morning coffee and continue with a working routine. So social networks provide a very different opportunity to share the user generated content and to create it and to upload it online. Instant messengers, are they just a mean of communication or should we put it all together with the collective of these social media websites. With the case of recently merged instant messenger telegram, we definitely can speak about instant messengers taking this niche and moving towards the social media as itself. Because in this case, it's not just the opportunity to chat with your colleagues, with your friends and create multiple conversations with big groups of people. But you can stream the information, you can exchange this information with others while you creating a channel through which you share your thoughts, ideas, and the content that is generated, guess by whom? By user. But what are the key features of social media? First one is interactivity. You can have the opportunity not just to content with another person or with a group of different people, which can be described as some kind of social interactivity. We can also speak about the technical interactivity. You can create multiple sources of content and you can use different tools to share it and distribute it. The second feature is the temporal structure of social media. It can be synchronous and asynchronous at the same time. When it comes to synchronous communication, it means that by the usage of instant messages, we can exchange information simultaneously. And this creates the special atmosphere of intimacy as you can feel the presence of your friend right there in your phone or near by you at the couch. Asynchronous communication appears when you get the updates from the Facebook group you're following from the the celebrity's group you want to track. And in this case, you can participate with a little bit of delay and at the same time, you might track the changes that happen there overnight, for example. Still social media provide us fewer social cues, just like Internet itself. Let's take a look at this illustration. Here you can see the conversation between two friends, and one is apparently inviting this second person to the birthday party. Why and how we can speak about the excitement of this person having upcoming birthday? Well, a number of emojis are used and this person's definitely looking forward to this party. Still the reply is quite short, but who knows? Maybe there would be an extension and maybe this person is just busy. Anyway the person sends in message in the very first place might be a little bit anxious about the reply of his friend. So in this case, we cannot get the context completely which can tell us that the Internet basically does have fewer social cues. Storage and replicability, well, thank you, Internet. And finally, we can store a lot, a lot, enormous terabytes of information online and we can share it with other people. But at the same time, all the changes which have been made online, they can be tracked. And replicability of the knowledge is another essential characteristic. What have been done online stays online, but you should keep in mind that it can be repeated and it can appear in some other place. The last feature of online media which help us to change our social practices is its reach. So now you can message your friend and your message would get instantly to him right now and right there. The reach is enormous, and basically, you can maintain the projects you will never be able to maintain without the usage of social media. The other feature is mobility. The social practices which we use to maintain offline are moving towards online. And you cannot only shop in the online stores, but at the same time, you can communicate with people who are selling your stuff. Basically, we're just moving all the experiences, maybe not all of the experiences, but many of them, to the online sphere which is very comfortable for us and this is one of the distinctive features of social media. But as we already mentioned that some things are changing within our social reality, let's take a closer look of what exactly is happening here. First of all, it's our interpersonal communication. Yes, it was definitely very difficult to arrange a meeting back in 15 or maybe 20 years. But now we cannot meet another person without our mobile phone, because we cannot expect what's going to happen with this person if he or she does not show up in 15 minutes. Definitely interpersonal communication is changing. It's making us much closer to those who live far away from us. And who we cannot reach by original means as like friendly conversation with a glass of wine. At the same time our other practices which involve interpersonal communication are changing. For example, the recruitment process, over 25% of employees are found via Facebook or LinkedIn or other social media websites, which is a very distinctive characteristic of our age. Community and communication is another thing that change over the time. How do you usually spend your leisure activities, tell me, 50 years ago? You definitely go to the community center, find the people you like and they all live nearby, and you all will definitely have some very nice time together. Now you can contact with those who live really far away and you can be a part of a very large community making the very large change if you're interested in some kind of social change. Or you can just be a fan and follow other people online. So the community is moving towards the online sphere, and social media is something that help us to provide the tools, the necessary tools to arrange and to make it happening. The other thing that is changing is mass communication and news dissemination. We don't really speak about us looking for news, rather than we speak about news looking for us. They can find us on Facebook, they can find us in the Instagram and definitely on Twitter. Social media provide us with the very good opportunity to see the news we definitely want to see. And I hope you remember the theory of selective exposure we discussed last week during the lecture five. And you will never try to limit your news consumption to the sources that you don't just particularly trust by sources that you particularly like. This point, which is very closely linked to the second one, to the community and communication, is changing the way how do we engage publics in different source and activities through these participatory techniques. What is discussion nowadays? Do people really go somewhere to the square, gather together, and discuss stuff? Do they go to the pub and discuss things which is essential for political or maybe social agenda? Now people come online and they create the new conversations, forums, and blogs. They use different sorts of social media to discuss what is essential for them and what is important. But with the emergence of social media, these participatory techniques which would rather end up in real action previously, might end up with the term called slacktivism nowadays. Is it equal if you put a like or share to some very important for you, political post on a Facebook? Or you would go out on the street and show that what you want and you would apply your opinion and say it out loud within the demonstration? That's a very questionable thing, and we need to discuss it further on. And the last but not the least is that practices of commerce, marketing, PR and advertising are changing. Nowadays, almost 25% of the content which exists online is branded. We want these products, services, and goods to be there. We want to communicate with the pizza place we particularly like just to ask whether they have this new type of pizza or they don't. If you want to purchase a new cell phone and you don't really want to buy iPhone for some reason. You're looking for something more interesting, you would go on Facebook and you ask your friends what is coming? What is interesting and what can they recommend you? So basically some kind of communication might happen if one of your friends who's working for the cell phone company. Anyway, commerce, marketing, PR and advertising practices are changing with the emergence of social media. Now we can communicate with brands and now we can communicate with others about this brand. As well as we can leave the feedback while using some sort of service or good. And we definitely want to share it with our friends and the close ones. Still, as we are dealing with communication theory, and hopefully some of you appear to be students, and some of you would do research on social media one day. What are the most hot topics in the research areas within the social media? First of all, it's a health-related communication. With the emergence of social media, it's changing differently. Just recently I opened my phone and the navigation application just recommended me to see the doctor online. I didn't want to do this, but I was quite amused how someone can provide me with consulting over my health just online. It's a new practice and a lot, tons of different information related to health care can be found online. Still, we need to be very cautious about this and try to track what is the difference approaching the communication between real doctor and real patient and online doctor with a real patient. Education and learning, this is what we're doing here right now. Social media and we can consider Coursera to be definitely a social media as a help for your comments, your shares, and your discussion which appear later after this lecture. And definitely, we need to focus on the way how learning can be integrated into this gamified process of the communication. We also have to take a look at the community dimension. We're going on online, how do people communicate with each other? How do they integrate and why some social media groups and networks are more popular in comparison with another ones. Information dissemination, fake news, Twitter, social media, Facebook. What is happening? How do individuals try to focus at their own media stream and how do they find the news that they particularly like? Or is it news that follow us everywhere? How to make the informative agenda more informative and how to focus it on the individual and make it customize? The other point is IT and computer science. Well, this is not something I'm an expert at, but all the algorithms that made possible online dating matches that can be possible, targeted advertising, and other complicated, rather complicated things. They are really important for us as social scientists, because as we will discuss later on in this lecture, technology is kind of changing us. And in this case, technology is making a direct influence on the way how we approach social life and on the way how do we structure our everyday practices? Business and marketing is also changing, and we discussed this already. How do you make your product more successful online? How do you make it more successful online as well? That's a good question, and theoretical backgrounds can provide us with some conceptual explanations that will be useful for the further conceptualization. Organizational and group communication, should we have social media in our company or we should just focus on something else and relate on interpersonal communication offline? How do we make group communication more engaging and more productive? These are the very good questions for the research. Political and social engagement, focusing on the way how do we organize an action and remembering the cases of Arab Spring. We really want to see how the Twitter revolution's coming, and how are they happening? And do we need some sort of preconditioned society in order to make it happen? Or it's just natural instrument that goes and which is adopted by the society which just helps us to take advantage of this less hierarchical structure in order to fight the hierarchical structure. So anyway, these are a number of very good research questions for you to find out. So now as we know now what social media actually are, let's move on to the theoretical approaches that can help us to describe and explain what's going on there. [MUSIC]
