1.5 – The Impact of Social Media on Group Communication
1.5 – The Impact of Social Media on Group Communication
You may disagree with the whimsical words of Ogden Nash and the more philosophical statement by Steve Jobs. Perhaps you feel that today’s electronic technologies are nothing but wonderful. Consider these facts about social media:
- Facebook was expected to register its one-billionth user sometime in 2012.
- Ten hours of video recordings are uploaded to YouTube every minute.
- Flickr provides access to more than three billion photographs.
- More than three-quarters of everyone worldwide who uses the Internet takes part in social media.1 Users of the world, unite!2
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
- Identify the nature and types of social media.
- Identify ways in which social media can foster and endanger group communication.
- Identify safeguards that groups can adopt when communicating via social media.
Do you remember the first time you saw the ocean? Did it awe and overwhelm you, as it did the authors of this book? Did you feel small and insignificant?
The ocean can affect us emotionally, but it can also make an intellectual impression. Knowing its scientific side, we realize that people can interact with the ocean in sundry ways. We also know it’s not possible for us as individuals or groups to go everywhere on the ocean at once or to tap all its potential. So it is with social media in the Digital Age.
The vastness, breadth, and ease of access to social media are unprecedented in human history. But they resemble the ocean in other ways besides their size. When we go to the sea, bad things can happen. We can fall prey to storms, find ourselves becalmed and bored, or discover that we don’t have the right gear to snag a particular kind of fish. We may also fall overboard and drown. Similar perils are associated with social media.
What Are Social Media?
A simple definition of social media is that they are web-based and mobile technologies that enable interaction among people. Social media may be divided into six types: collaborative projects, such as Wikipedia; blogs and microblogs, such as Twitter; content communities, such as YouTube; social networking sites, such as Facebook; virtual game worlds; and virtual social worlds. Of these types, the first four are most likely to be valuable for serious and purposeful group communication.
How Social Media Help Groups
Until just a few generations ago, members of a group who wanted to communicate with each other at the same time needed to move themselves to a shared physical location to do so. Today, social media make it unnecessary for people to “transport their atoms” like this. These media also facilitate communication within groups in several ways. First, they allow physically separated people to communicate in real-time. Such communication is called “synchronous,” whereas interchanges that don’t follow each other are referred to as “asynchronous.” Just the “wow” factor of seeing and hearing people simultaneously when they’re dispersed over hundreds or th