The Impacts of Social Media

The impacts of Social Media are multidimensional.  In the modern world, Social media has become an integral part of people’s lives. Apart from networking people from around the globe, it has become the most important source of breaking news. People no longer wait for the television to broadcast or the newspaper the print the news. In the age of social media, people can access  news from all over the world through social networks such as Facebook, Twitter etc, where news is spread all over the world with just a single click, in moments. (Amin & Thrift, 1995)

One of the boons of Social media is the increased level of interaction between people from various cultural and geographical backgrounds. McLuhan and Powers (1989) stated that with the advent of social networks, people are able to keep in touch with each other at their convenience irrespective of their geographical barriers. In simpler terms Social media has diminished the time and space constraints.

Apart from the social influences, Social media has had its fair share of influence in the field of politics as well. Ranging from the Iran elections, and Obama’s reelection for a second term as US President, and political unrests in Egypt, social media has transformed several political landscapes as well. (Grossman, 2009)

Further, social media has also rendered its invaluable contribution towards education and promoting the importance of literacy. Through the means of regular social networking, children often develop better communication skills and are often perceived to be more aware of their surroundings. With the growth of ICTs and the Internet, information is now readily available on a wide range of topics, which arms the users with facilities like never before.

Finally, Social media has also changed the dynamics of marketing as more and more companies are now inclined to communicating directly with their consumers than spend all their resources trying to produce advertisements on TV. Direct communication with the customers has helped them understand the needs of the people better making the marketing policies much more acceptable and consumer-centered. (Gefeb & Straub, 2004)

 

References

• Amin, A., and Thrift, N., eds., 1995. Globalization, Institutions, and Regional Development in Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Gefeb,D., and Straub, D. W., 2004. Consumer trust in B2C e-Commerce and the importance of social presence: experiments in e-Products and e-Services. Omega. 32 (6), pp. 407-424.
• Grossman,L., 2009. Iran's Protests: Why Twitter Is the Medium of the Movement. TIME. [PDF] [Online] Available at: http://www.cc.gatech.edu/classes/AY2011/cs4001_summer/documents/Time-Iran-Twitter.pdf [Accessed 10 December 2013]
• McLuhan, M. and Powers, B. R., 1989. The Global Village: Transformations in World Life and Media in the 21^st Century.New York: Oxford University Press.

 

 

Play?: Videogames and Gamification

The concept of gamification refers to the implementation of gaming mechanisms in user experience designs, thereby transforming a task into a game play. The idea is to draw the attention of the participants towards the task in the form of games, in order to accomplish the task with fun which makes learning easier (Koster, 2004). This is similar to adding points to the LinkedIn profile completion task for example.

The mechanism of gaming in it, whereby the network awards points according to the user’s information levels triggers the innate desires within a person to take the task as a sort of competition, which is important as well as entertaining. Thus, the sole purpose is to create challenges and then distribute rewards depending on the completion of those challenges. (Deterding, 2011)

Some of the advantages of gamification are its tendency to give direction and leadership to the workers, who work towards a common goal with a self constructed strategy just as in games. It encourages the participants to put in a better effort by inducing a sense of competition, whereby one can be left behind, just like in video games (McGonigal, 2011). Gamification empowers communities and brings people together through social networks or in work places. Apart from uniting the crowd, it gives them an objective and purpose, which justifies their existence. This Crowdsourcing is one of the biggest promises made by gamification. In management free companies, gamification gathers the input of the hundreds of employees towards a desired output by the means of collaborative tools.

While there are positive effects of gamification some of the negative examples of this theory is the phenomenon of edutainment, an idea that developed recently, where schools started educating people through the means of entertainment. This form of digitized education left the students without knowledge of core skills. (Zichermann, 2011)
References:

• Deterding, S., 2011. Meaningful play: Getting "gamification" right. Google TechTalk. Retrieved from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ZGCPap7GkY [Accessed 06 December 2013]
• Koster, R., 2004.  A theory of fun for game design. Phoenix, AZ: Paraglyph Press.
• McGonigal, J., 2011.  Reality is broken: Why games make us better and how they can change the world.  New York, NY: Penguin Press
• Zichermann, G., 2011. Gamification by design: Implementing game mechanics in web and mobile apps.  New York, NY: O' Reilly Media.

 

 

Play: Digital Arts, Internet Memes and Spreadable

The terms “viral” and “memes” have a distinct set of meaning when it comes to the world of marketing and advertising. As suggested by Henry Jenkins, these terms are the biological metaphors designed to explain a certain media phenomenon. The way media content spreads through people and cultures, it has often been likened to that of a biological virus, which spreads throughout the body seamlessly. The kind of techniques used by the media in marketing and advertising nowadays such as the Word-of-Mouth marketing and other appealing mannerisms such as video content and musical mixes in order to attract the public attention towards a certain product is being referred to as the virus within the spreadable media. Henry Jenkins refers to this process as “guerrilla marketing, exploiting social networks, and mobilizing consumers and distributors”. (Jenkins, 2009)

DouglasRushkoff in his book highlights the functioning of the so called media virus. He argues that the media virus is similar to the pathogens that that travel within and affect our body. The content spreads among the people through sharing. These media contents contain underlying messages and meanings that are intended to infect the common minds in order to compel them towards a product that is being advertised (pp.9-10). For example, the endorsement of a certain product by our favorite celebrities often brainwashes us into buying the product. These ideological codes are termed as “memes”.

These memes or hidden messages with specific agendas were first likened to viruses and memes as in biological systems, by biologist Richard Dawkins who wanted to explain the cultural evolution through biological terms. He outlined that just like the pathogen and the human body, the society also evolves with the infusion of media encoded messages.

Dawkins’s theory was further seconded by Stephenson in 1992, when they pointed out how the human mind is vulnerable towards these media encoded messages with preset agendas, with examples like mass hysteria. Mass hysteria is a phenomenon wherein, panic spreads amongst a group of people due to the inception of panic in one person, almost like the way a virus spreads, only in this case the people have a role to play, like vehicles carrying the virus. (Neil Stephenson,1992)