In the year 2024, the day of Mr. S, a college student, begins and ends with his use of social media. SNSs are characterized by the provision of communities and the use of personal media to facilitate social interaction. Twitter and Facebook are prime examples, and they have a huge impact on modern society and are at the center of many controversies.
In 2024, college student S’s day begins with a notification from a friend on KakaoTalk asking him to show her a difficult assignment. After staying up late last night chatting with his girlfriend, Mr. S forgets about the assignment and quickly accesses etl to check it. In a rush, Mr. S connects to the majority community on WhatsApp and finds a solution posted by his seniors to put out the fire. Feeling much more relaxed, Mr. S leisurely walks to school, catches up with friends from back home on Facebook, and reminisces about old times. As she moves from class to class, she can’t put her phone down to check her favorite singer’s tweets. On the way home, she passes the time by playing social networking games like Tiny Farm and Anipang, which she recently downloaded.
The term social network service (SNS) literally refers to a group of services that allow users to socialize using a network, such as the Internet or an intranet. In a broad sense, any medium that allows for interactive social interaction on the Internet, including commenting services, bulletin board services, and other services that allow users to post their opinions, can be considered an SNS. However, with the rise of mobile culture and the popularity of Twitter and Facebook, these and similar services are now commonly referred to as SNS.
The two main characteristics that distinguish SNSs from other network services are the existence of communities and the possibility of using them as solo media. This is a natural consequence of the nature of SNSs, which is socializing over a network. The presence of communities provides a social context that is an essential backdrop for socializing. For example, Facebook provides a community where individual opinions can be gathered through the ability to automatically post comments to a wall. It also provides anonymous communities, such as groups and pages, to enable various social activities. However, it’s not enough to simply “provide” the functionality of a community. It can only function as a place for social activities when relationships between many users are built up and a society is created that enables net communication. For example, a school administration website such as Maisnu allows users to post complaints and opinions on a bulletin board. However, this is mainly a one-on-one Q&A, and does not facilitate communication between users. Therefore, Mysnoo is not an SNS service.
The fact that it can be used as a one-person media means that the SNS is owned by the individual, not by the company that provides the service or the large media that provides the information. For example, a comment section on an internet news site fulfills the aforementioned criteria of a community. However, the impact of an individual’s comments on an internet comment section is usually much smaller than that of an article. However, in the case of SNS services, each individual has an equal opportunity to speak, and there is no entity that has an effect beyond the individual.
SNSs are often categorized according to these two characteristics – whether they emphasize community or function as one-person media, and the former is usually called Facebook-type and the latter is called Twitter-type, after the names of representative services.
Although the term SNS began to be used after Twitter and Facebook became popular worldwide, the concept actually began to be coined in the early days of the Internet. Traces of social services can be found in Alphanet and Usenet, which were used primarily for military purposes in the early days of the Internet, and early Internet portals actually functioned as SNS by providing community functions through private bulletin board systems (BBS). This concept was further refined in the late 90s, when Cyworld in Korea and MySpace in the United States became popular, and the concept of SNS as ‘social activities on a network’ was established, although there was no term for it. However, it was not until smartphones enabled ubiquitous networking and Facebook gained global popularity that this concept spread globally and gained the name SNS.
The reason behind the popularity of SNSs is the fundamental human need to communicate. As social animals, humans have always valued communication as an interaction with society and as the glue that allows us to exist in groups. As such, communication has been one of the most important technologies since ancient times. The key to communication and communication technology is how well we can control the physical and social factors that interfere with it. This is why social networks are so popular right now. They almost completely eliminate physical and social factors from user-to-user communication. Take Twitter for example. We can freely communicate with Hollywood stars who are on the other side of the world and whom we would otherwise have no contact with through tweets. And even though real names have been introduced to a certain extent, anonymity still frees people from social factors such as age and status. It goes without saying that the development of devices like smartphones has made it possible to access social media anytime, anywhere.
The impact of social media on modern society is evident in many aspects of our lives. Take the T24 Social Festival, for example, which recently went viral. What started as a simple debate within the internet community about whether or not one person could pitch a military 24-person tent, was amplified and reproduced through social media, becoming a nationwide festival with thousands of people participating in person and hundreds of thousands more expressing their opinions through the internet. The Jasmine Revolution, which swept the Islamic and Arab world into a frenzy of democratization, was also carried out using the grammar of social media rather than traditional media, which can be easily controlled. The advertising industry is already utilizing social media as an active marketing tool, and many politicians are using social media as a new outlet to voice their opinions.
The explosive power of social media comes from uncertainty. Since each individual acts as a one-person media, it is impossible to control it centrally like traditional media. Therefore, their effects are unpredictable. This is one of the biggest advantages of social media, but it’s also one of its biggest disadvantages. It is also impossible to control information that should not be spread, such as privacy, or distorted information that is circulated as fact. In particular, in recent years, there have been many cases of witch hunts against individuals, such as the “XX girl” case. To prevent this, many countries, including South Korea, have recently started censoring SNS, and there is a lot of controversy between individual freedom of speech and government control for proper use.
The economics of social media is also a very controversial topic. As mentioned earlier, it’s nearly impossible to measure the economic impact of social media because it’s so difficult to predict the outcome. In addition, the way social media works requires a large number of people to participate, so many services are free to attract users. As a result, it is difficult to generate direct economic revenue from SNS, and even more difficult to calculate it accurately. In fact, Korea’s leading mobile SNS service, KakaoTalk, despite having over 10 million users, has been losing money every year and is working on developing a revenue model to create concrete economic effects.
In this article, we’ve looked at what SNSs are, how they grew, why they became popular, and their current social impact. Although they’ve been around since the beginning of the internet, social media is still a very recent concept and a medium that’s still growing, which is why they’re at the center of many controversies. But even if you put aside the controversies, there’s no denying that social media is making waves in the modern world and has a huge impact on people’s lives.
