Isn’t “Social Media” the most used phrase and you keep hearing about it every minute, in today’s computer era? Yes, social media is that recurring expression in our life which we speak around a lot often to describe what we post and read on sites and apps like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat and others. So, that makes us simply infer that social media are/is web-based sites that allow people to interact with each other.
Though, social media gets very confusing too sometimes, when we have to describe and talk about certain sites like Facebook, and also a site like Digg, plus a site like Wikipedia, and even sometimes a site like I can have Cheez burger. You look at these sites, and say to yourself, just what exactly is social media, anyway? The term is so vague that it can basically be used to describe almost any website on the internet today. But, then is that right?
Some people have more of a restricted view of social media, often equating it to mean the same as social networking (a.k.a. Facebook, Twitter, etc.). Other people don't consider blogs to fall under the social media category. Some people even consider a simple question & answer (Q&A) website like Quora.com to be a social media platform. It seems as if everyone has their own personal opinion of what social media is and isn't. But, can that establish the actual definition and standards of social media? No.
Hence, let's dive deeper into the general concept of social media to gain a clearer and more precise understanding. To get away from the complicated jargon and stick to simpler and clearer understanding, we will break the phrase “Social Media” into two parts:
• The 'social' part: refers to interacting with other people by sharing information with them and receiving information from them.
• The 'media' part: refers to an instrument of communication, like the internet (while TV, radio, and newspapers are examples of more traditional forms of media).
From these two separate terms, we can pull a basic definition together- “Social media are web-based communication tools that enable people to interact with each other by sharing and consuming information”. Let’s see figure describing the essential vast landscape of social media.
