Social Media

There are many things in today’s society that would have been alien, or at least considered in the realm of science fiction, to anyone a generation ago. Social media has changed the way we communicate to our best friends and family as well as complete strangers. In itself social media comprises of several different aspects as a whole, including communication, such as Facebook, collaboration, such as Google Reader, and multimedia, such as deviantArt. Many media fall into a few different categories like in the case of WordPress, and others tend to focus on one group. Social media has altered the way we share things with each other, making it easier and more efficient to send information about ourselves all over the planet.

Social media is distinguished from industrial media like newspapers and films by the fact that they are very cheap and are accessible to anybody to publish or access information. In industrial media, significant resources are required to publish information, and not everyone is able to participate in its production. In addition, industrial media are often owned by governments or privately, whereas social media tools are available generally to everyone at a small cost or no cost at all. They also differ in other aspects, such as usability. Often certain skills and training are required in order to produce industrial media, which makes industrial media fundamentally elitist in its nature. Social media on the other hand can be produced by anybody as long as they are aware of the rules of the media.