Social media is Concept, definition, types, classification with examples, virtual worlds, goals, objectives and features of development

2024 Author: Henry Conors | [email protected]. Last modified: 2024-02-12 02:39

Currently in Russia we are talking about the emergence of a competitive element between the Youtube platform and television. Most people over the age of forty trust the latter more than any information channels on the Internet, but among young people the opposite trend is observed. It is with this that the emergence of the phenomenon of the social media market is connected. In other words, media with an enhanced effect of attracting attention, or media with the possibility of interactive feedback between the recipient and the acceptor.

Concept and definition

Social media is a method of mass communication tied to the Internet system. These include literally all information products that can be found on the Web: videos, pictures, texts.

If we turn to a more scientific definition, we can find out the following:

Social media is a type of mass media that is used to describe new forms of communication between content producers and its consumers and for which the definingwhat matters is the factor of co-production of content by the users of the final product, when each reader/subscriber of the blog can, for example, perform the functions of a commentator, reporter, photojournalist and editor of this service._Wiktionary

Is the Cross Country video blog a type of social media? Yes. The official public of the Civic Chamber of the Russian Federation "VKontakte"? Yes. Twitter posting funny pictures and stories of cats? Yes again.

To put it simply, everything you see around you online is social media.

Types of online media

Classically, there are three types of online platforms of this type. In the category of social media, these are mass, thematic, as well as photo and video hosting. Let's dwell on them in more detail.

• Massive social media are the main platforms for communication, where everyone can be interested in any part of it. Social networks, general news platforms.
• Thematic social media - professional online platforms, specific forums like Future Moms or Kuban Joiners.
• Photo and video hosting - YouTube, "Yandex. Pictures" and so on. The key difference from the previous two is that this view consists entirely of visual (or audio-visual) content.

Classification

There is a clear classification of varieties in the worldsocial media. There are four classes - communications, collaboration, multimedia, and others that are not included in the previous three formats, but do not have enough features to be singled out in a separate class.

The first includes blogging and microblogging, creating your own content (posts, photos on avatars) in social networks, profiles on dating sites. To the second - various variations of "Wikipedia", to the third - accounts on video and photo sites. Among those belonging to the fourth class, question-answer systems are usually singled out (everyone knows "Mail.ru Answers", for example) or various virtual worlds (for example, literary role-playing games).

There are mixed positions, for example, the Periscope system, which simultaneously belongs to the first and third class, can be attributed to relatively new social media.

Virtual worlds

In addition to the named literary role-playing (creating your characters, acting out their thoughts, feelings, actions by creating text, in some cases using visual means), virtual worlds include multiplayer or single-player online games. In other words, this is a world created artificially, by programming. The most popular social media in Russia of this type are World of Tanks and various economic games ("Farms") located on social networking platforms.

Goals and objectives

What is the difference between social media and other media? First of all, its mobility. Including the user in the creation of content allows social media to better serve the need to inform the individual in the long run.

On the other hand, due to the same element of inclusion, social media is a more convenient tool for managing people's moods than advertisers actively use (as an example, targeted advertising). Analysis of social media, which is carried out using neural networks and high-speed linguistic modules.

The tasks of social media include step-by-step expansion of the audience by increasing the quantity and quality of multidirectional content in some cases, and attracting previously uninvolved consumers through advertising campaigns.

The global goal of social media is to reach the largest possible (maximum possible) share of the audience in order to further fulfill their functions.

Functions

Given that social media includes journalism transformed by the technical achievements of the century, it has also adopted its functionality.

Classic media features:

• communicative - the connection of different parts of society with each other, their awareness of the existence and problems of each other, help in easing social tension,
• ideological - the formation of a stable certain worldview in a person (that's why the media is often called the fourth estate),
• cultural and educational - enlightening the vieweror reader,
• recreative - relaxation, recovery from stress.

In various scientific studies, the advertising function is either singled out as a separate function or refers to the recreational one.

Development Features

The emergence of social media was predetermined by the public access of the World Wide Web in 1919 and the NCSA Mosaic browser in 1933.

If by the end of the nineties there were fifty million people using the network, then in the year 217 there were more than three and a half billion, which is 48% of the world's population.

It is clear that with such a pace (from 1955 to 2017 the number of users increased seventy times!) of the development of the Internet, the ways of interacting with the public are also in continuous development.

The progressive movement that characterizes the development of the system looks like the promotion in social media of content that is more technically complex in terms of its ability to reproduce. Text materials, which prevailed before the beginning of the 2000s, were practically supplanted by visual ones. The emergence of the YouTube platform is associated with the general videofication of information (it’s not for nothing that the generation of zeros is called the generation with clip thinking, that is, they are not able to get carried away for a period longer than five minutes, and assimilate information if it is presented in a bright cover), which, in its turn, could arise only due to the appearance of proper technicalequipment (a typical computer of the late nineties - early 2000s simply could not cope with playing high-format video). Thus, the development of social media has given rise to a whole list of new professions: video blogger, blogger, SMM analyst, web designer and many others.

Prospects

Does this mean that social media has created new job opportunities without crowding out old ones? Yes.

Of course, despite the advent of the Internet, the profession of a carpenter has not ceased to be necessary, so the emergence of new professions has not replaced the old ones. Although, of course, the attractiveness of some vacancies has become much greater compared to others. But such a boom occurs in all periods after scientific and technological achievements (after Gagarin's flight, in the sixties, everyone wanted to be astronauts). At the same time, the passion for fashion, following the role model of the “hero” does not lead to the fact that some profession is seriously and for a long time fixed as the most relevant and promising. Firstly, whether or not a trend is infatuated depends on the area of interest and range of skills of a particular person, and secondly, on the Internet, due to the news boom, the peak of popularity of a particular blogger or other factors, there is a natural rotation of the most prestigious, sought-after, attractive professions..

Social media monitoring systems suggest that the prospects for social media development are quite promising. So, the most popular in RussiaThe VKontakte social network is visited by more than thirty-six million people every month, and, for example, the audience of the Instagram social network in Russia is about twelve and a half million people a month. Social networks are one of the ways a person expresses himself, and in the era of victorious individualism, they will only gain points of attractiveness, especially among young people. It follows that now social media is a separate business area, in which the key point is the sale and resale of promoted social media accounts.

Examples

But what can be said without evidence when there is a lot of open access evidence of the triumph of online networks over previously known forms of media interaction?

Yuri Dud collects four million seven hundred thousand views of his interview per day, humorous videos of the Cross are gaining six million six hundred thousand views per month and have the potential to gain more and more when television, having years of prestige gained, cannot retain its audience and forced to cross "to the territory of the enemy", creating their own websites, broadcasting parallel to the TV channel.

Many surviving TV shows owe their success to the support of online platforms and their viewers (Twitter discussions to engage new viewers, trailers and targeted ads that pop up on the World Wide Web), but despite this symbiosis, we can confidently talk about victorysocial media: the TV generation will die sooner or later, given that there is no clear trend among young people to watch TV programs.

Thus, in social networks in Russia, media belonging to the generation of the last century are increasingly simply ridiculed in popular publics.