Rising of New Media
Starting with Usenet, the internet discussion system
which make people communicate by posting messages and reading them, the new
media conception seen on media world first in 1979. This program was actually
the mixed type of web forums and e-mails, which is now accepted as the
precursor to internet forums. Earlier
than that, in 1950’s the primitive forms of blog systems were appeared on
computer systems which is known as Open
Diary. These two programs were at the very core of the new emerging media
systems. Then we see more modern and complicated websites on internet world,
such as Myspace in 2003 and global
phenomenon Facebook in 2004. All
these years, booming of social media has done so many impacts at almost all
parts of the universe, especially in the developing countries. Some
revolutions, social movements, upheavals and so on come after intensive using
of these technologies by vast majority of societies. We will talk about it with
more details.
When
one look for categorizing the social media programs, then it is really useful
to take a look below.
1) Common Projects ( Wikipedia, Internet
Forums, E-mails)
2) Blogs (Blogger.com etc.)
3) Microblog sites ( Twitter etc.)
4) Content Groups ( Youtube etc.)
5) Social Networks ( Facebook etc.)
First,
common projects, such as Wikipedia can be imagined by its title; people upload
their contributions to the site by posting their documents, columns etc. for
the service of other persons. The example that given above, Wikipedia, is
probably the most succesful project so far. In Turkey, eksisozluk.com is very
vowel common project which is usually auditing or slamming by court decisions
or government bodies.
Secondary,
blogs are very common in today’s internet world which are turned into a
primarily source for information gathering by the first hand. Some leading
informations about Blogs world can be seen below.
Arrival Time: 03/04/2014, 16.30
As
the third one microblog websites, we definitely encounter to Twitter in this
area, the secondary most popular social media website just after Facebook. It
provides sending 140 character messages –called tweets to users which is at
first glance deemed as a stressful type. But after some tweeting, many users
get use to it and realize that restrained to 140 character of a tweet can pave
a different way in terms of being clarified to those who follows the user.
Twitter now has a critical role especially in halting democrasies, many
incidents has showed its power when social movements, democratic
transformations, revolts against tyrannys or oppressive regimes occured. During
the Gezi Park protests last June, Twitter was the main tool in order to
communicate protestors each other and spread the protests through all over the country. Other Twitter based protests
were Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street, Colour Revolution and Ukranien Upheavals.
Lastly, social Networks
are very popular on web world, particularly Facebook is dominated the market.
The young founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg was designed this website in
order to make fair in love with his college friends, but later on things have
not happened in that way. Facebook rapidly reached a global attainment; while
the lucrative founder make incredible amount of dolars from popularity of his
website, many users log onto this website for the aim of democratic demands,
proclaim correctness of disarrays wherever they happened in the world etc. Even
this success story were carried into the movie screen by the prominent director
David Fincher and film has grossed $224,920,315 worldwide.
IMPORTANCE
Well then, why social
media is so important such that? Because it has some impacts on people! We have
already mentioned what they are above. But what are the negative impacts of
social media? Let’s say wikipedia! Wikipedia is very appropriate to spread
misconceptions, do speculations by using internet so effective. In addition to
Wikipedia, the retweet button of the tweets on Twitter causes violating untruth
things to millions of people just in few minutes.
Let’s take a look at a
case which gives us an idea that the impacts of leaked tapes which were
spreading mainly by using Twitter and Youtube during the election campaign of Turkish
ruling party as known AKP. Probably this election process would have been a
good laboratorium for considering the power of social media across the country.
Last week, Turkish people
casted their votes under the shadow of corruption allegations of ruling party and
war strategies to its neighbourhood Syria, which are planned by spychief,
foreign minister, undersecretary of the foreign ministry etc. in order to gain
more votes by evoking heroic emotions of people. Where so many people learned
them from the violation of tapes on social media, Twitter is taken the most
important media tool role as a main source. It came to a critical position
which urged the government to shut down the site. Although, all these
allegations seem not so served the purpose of who put them into the
violation. Because, the ruling party
which have many “sins” in terms of democracy, has won the elections with app. 45%
of the total amount of votes ahead of rest of the other political parties in
spite of the corruption allegations. The problem with this result is coming
from the fact that despite with 18 million users of Twitter in Turkey sending
millions of tweets every day which are seen mainly mentioned all these
allegations (particularly the last remaining days to that election day) can not
be successed as changing the political behaviours of people. The expectations
about social impacts of social media has broken by reality, thus the
assumptions relating with it has to rethink by whom be paying much attention to
it.
Yorumlar
Yorum Gönder