HS 4120- Episode 1

• According to Campbell-Kelly and Garcia-Swartz (2013), the “internet” was born in 1969 with the demonstration of the 4-node ARPANET network… however, the “Internet” did not take off until the early 1990s
• “The internet is a metanet, or network of networks, linking private individuals, companies, charities, special interest groups and governments around the world, allowing them to exchange information in standardised forms such as electronic mail or email, and the hypertext documents of the World Wide Web (web or www)” (Riggulsford, 2013, p. 67)
• Types of Social Media(Riggulsford, 2013)

  1. Collaborative projects
  2. Blogs and microblogs
  3. Content communities
  4. Social networking sites
  5. Virtual worlds
  6. Virtual social worlds
• Social media is the colonisation of the space between traditional broadcast and private dyadic communication, providing people with a scale of group size and degrees of privacy that we have termed scalable sociality (Miller et al., 2016)
• The advent of Web 2.0, shortly after the turn of the millennium, shifted online services from offering channels of networked communication to becoming interactive, two-way vehicles for networked sociality (van Dijck, 2013)
• Before PCs, network access was confined. The diffusion of millions of PCs in the 1980s created a mass-market for online services
• Search engines developed at the turn of the millennium, with Google Search being the clear winner
• Social Identity Theory

  • Self-worth --> identification with particular groups
  • Explains why group rejection is so painful
  • How we understand ourselves and our place in the world
  • Joining virtual groups and building a large group of friends
• Before social media existed, life involved:

  1. Public Broadcast Media like Television, Radio, Newspapers and
  2. Private Communication like Telephone
• The World Wide Web was invented in 1989 by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, which formed the basis of a new type of networked communication (CERN, n.d.)
• “The diffusion of desktop PCs finally created the environment in which the Internet could flourish” (Campbell-Kelly, & Garcia-Swartz, 2013, p. 19)
• The late 20th century and the modern era brought electronic forms

  • New methods of communication
  • New opportunities
  • Powerful tools for information dissemination
  • Online communal spaces
  • Pose a number of significant challenges
• Social media are “forms of electronic communication (such as websites for social networking and microblogging) through which users create online communities to share information, ideas, personal messages, and other content (such as videos)” (Merriam-Webster, 2020)
• Online Scalable Sociality

  1. Private vs public

  2. Small vs large groups

  3. No rules

  4. Groups and platforms may overlap
• Social Media Presence for 11–18-year-olds in school in England: Most students used 5 or 6 social media platforms from a young age
• Episode Takeaways: Syllabus importance, social networks in human history, new media impact, digital natives and immigrants, popularity of social networking sites, moral panic around social media
• Moral Panic: Concerns about losing authentic humanity, cognitive abilities, addiction, and impact on imagination
• Digital Immigrants: Born before 1980 according to Marc Prensky (2001), adults who missed growing up in the digital age, less tech savvy and less familiar with the tech language of digital natives
• What are social networking sites (SNSs): "SNSs are virtual communities where users can create individual public profiles, interact with real-life friends, and meet other people based on shared interest" (Kuss & Griffiths, 2011, p. 3528)
• Types of Social Media

  • Collaborative projects
  • Blogs and microblogs
  • Content communities
  • Social networking sites
  • Virtual worlds
  • Virtual social worlds
• Polymedia: None of these platforms can be properly understood if considered in isolation
• Theory of Attainment: Technologies make no difference to essential humanity according to Miller et al., (2016)
• Digital Natives: Born after 1980 according to Marc Prensky (2001), grew up or growing up in the digital age, culture of connectivity, learn differently than previous generations of students