The Social Web and a Lot of Advantages to the Users - Case Study Example

Social Web The social web can be defined as the way people interact with each other all over the world using the World Wide Web, freely sharing information about each other through words, picture and even videos. There are many well known social sites such as YouTube, Facebook, twitter LinkedIn, Flickr, MySpace just to name a few. It would be true to say that social interactions have evolved greatly since the introduction of social networking sites which in turn constitute the social web. Billions of people are now interconnected with each other and the world is a much smaller place than before. But does the social web have positive or negative effects in general on the human population? In my judgment, the social web has a lot of advantages to the users. The social web has been a long time in making and has surely come a long way. As early as 1969, a company known as CompuServe, commercially provided internet services to the United States through a technology called dial-up, it had approximately 600,000 subscribers. The first email was delivered in 1971 and in 1978, a virtual community of sorts was created by two individuals, whose hobby were computers, when they invented the Bulletin Board System as a way of making announcements, sharing information and inform those in their circles of meetings. In the subsequent years, America Online AOL opened followed by Tripod which was a community online for college students. In 1993, WWW technology was donated to the world by CERN and the Mosaic was unveiled which gave way to the modern web pages that are in use currently. When the world was celebrating and ushering in the new millennium, over seventy million computers were connected to the internet. The world’s largest online wiki, the Wikipedia was started, while a social networking site, Friendster, was introduced to the United States and within three months it had over three million users. In 2013, Facebook users hit 1.11billion; being quite an achievement since it was launched in 2004, while YouTube recorded four billion views per day and a billion users per month. Twitter has also marked tremendous growth by having more than 500 million subscribed users and LinkedIn follows suit by 225 million users (Szabo and Barefoot, 2009). All these milestones indicate that the social web is well accepted and it must therefore carry many advantages to the users, either individuals or organizations. The social web has helped plan for meetings easier and less time consuming. As compared to the conventional modes of meeting that people had to be physically present in a certain venue, with the social web, this has all changed. Apart from the fact that, it has made it easier to organize meetings through easy communication and chat, people can now attend meetings virtually. The participants only need to agree on what time is convenient for them, and then they can chat through the various available chat rooms such as Google and Facebook. They can also decide to chat using video as is available on Google + or even Skype. The social web has made it easier for families to keep in touch by allowing them to share experiences, events, images and thoughts via a secure but public means. Before, it was only possible to communicate with your loved ones by phone, emails or letters but now this has been made easier. Members of one’s family can keep tabs on what the person is up to, see any uploaded pictures and aid in deciding when a family event can be scheduled. These for sure have been welcomed as compared to just being informed about what has been going on in a person’s life through phone calls and text messages. For the professionals, the world has been opened up even further, through the social web; they can open accounts that help them create networks of people who are of the same school of thought. Academics can find people that they can share their work with and exchange ideas on how to make it better, or simply engage in stimulating academic conversations. The professionals are now finding it easier to get clients, possible employers and business partners through the social web. It has opened up opportunities for business growth and expansion through sites such as LinkedIn which was specially made for such forums (Rutledge, 2008). People are now more informed thanks to the social web, individuals read and share information that is of interest to them and like minded people get to read things they would have never been aware of. People are aware of news and current events globally because it is easier to access them through the social web. Blogs and other forums get exposure through word of mouth from people who read them therefore making them popular and increasing readership. It is easier to share one’s opinions and thoughts on a certain piece of information or news (Golbeck, 2013), as compared to earlier days when the only way that one could read news was through printed media and sharing of opinions was very limited to those who are in one’s surrounding. The social web can be used to market products and drive campaigns through minimal costs. By advertising on pages that have a lot of users such as Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube and Twitter, one is guaranteed that his advertisement will be viewed by many people. This will in turn lead to sales if a person sees a product that is of interest to him, this method has worked well for many organizations and mass growth has been reported (Zarrella, 2010). The social web can also be used to drive traffic to one’s website and increase the number of viewers. One can paste the address of her page on some of the social sites and give a hint of what the viewer might get when they access the page. Facebook also allows users to like certain pages that are of interest to them, this is visible to the people on their networks which means that people will be enticed to access pages that are most viewed hence increasing the traffic to that website (Okonkwo, 2010). The social web has also a positive impact on children, by helping them gain confidence through interacting with other people online, with every evolving technology, the children will be aware of it therefore increasing their knowledge on media. Children can grow their talents by showing what they can do online, either posting videos of themselves or pictures and they can get support from the social web community. They are also exposed to diverse ways of thinking, opinions and cultures; this is beneficial to a child because it widens his scope of thought and ensures that he is not locked up in a specific way of thinking. The social web also has its fair share of disadvantages; despite the fact that it can build an organization’s or individual’s reputation, it can also damage it within a very short time. Cases of videos and pictures gone viral on the social web are not new. Celebrities have had their names tainted and companies their products discredited to leaked information that paints them in a wrong way, some persons or organizations barely endure such tragedies but some come out more powerfully after addressing the matter. The social web has been credited for reduced productivity by employees who use company’s valuable time chatting and engaging in forums that are not beneficial to the organization. Some employees have been known to damage the company’s reputation using the media leveraging on the fact that one can be anonymous on the social web (Fornahl, Zellner and Audretsch, 2005). People have found easy prey of unsuspecting social web users and lured them to bad situations, be it identity theft, child pornography and so many others, young children are now exposed to a world of immorality due to easy access of pornographic materials (Fuchs, 2012). Violence among children has also been on a notable increase as some of the games that the children play on the social web promote violence. In conclusion, the social web has brought tremendous changes to the world as we know it. Despite it having some negative effects on its users, it is fair to say that the positive effects bear more weight than the negative. References Zarrella, D. (2010). The Social Media Marketing Book. California: OReilly Media, Inc., Rutledge, P.A. (2008). The Truth About Profiting From Social Networking. New Jersey: FT Press. Barefoot, D. Szabo, J. L. (2009). Friends With Benefits: A Social Media Marketing Handbook. California: No Starch Press Series. Okonkwo, U. (2010). Luxury Online: Styles, Strategies, Systems. London: Macmillan. Golbeck, J. (2013). Analyzing the Social Web. Massachusetts: Morgan Kaufmann Fornahl, D. Zellner, C. (2005). Audretsch, D. B. The role of labour mobility and informal networks for knowledge transfer. New York City: Springer. Fuchs, C. (2012). Internet and Surveillance: The Challenges of Web 2.0 and Social Media. London: Routledge. Read More