Social media terms such as “tag,” “check-in,” and “hashtag” show that social media has become an integral part of our lives. We will describe the evolution of early social media, address the current changes in social media and concerns about the authenticity of communication, and emphasize that new ways of communicating are taking shape.
“Tagging,” ‘checking in,’ and ‘hashtagging’ are common terms used on social media today. Tagging is when you attach people you’re with when you post, checking in is when you mark a place you’ve uploaded from, and hashtags are when users create categories to categorize posts. The familiarity of these terms shows how social media has become an integral part of our lives. As social media becomes more of a part of our daily lives, we often find ourselves creating alter egos within these networks that we can easily share and talk about with others. The ease with which we can share and showcase our lives on the internet also brings with it issues such as loss of privacy. As users realize these problems, the purpose of use is changing to solve them, and SNS is evolving.
In Korea, the earliest SNS was a site called ‘Daemoong’. It was a school-based community where people could share photos and stories with their classmates online. Later, a web page called “Cyworld” was created to help people make a wider range of friends outside of school. This was followed by the creation of Facebook, which broadened the concept of friends once again by introducing a system that allowed people to know friends of friends. In this space, you can know not only your friends’ friends but also strangers, and you can make friends with anyone as long as you have a common category, making it possible to create a wider range of friends than in the previous stage. However, not satisfied with these spaces, an SNS with a more convenient form of information sharing emerged: Instagram. While before that, relationships were centered around one’s own identity, the current SNS is more about sharing information than the concept of self. It has become like a big photo album on the Internet by breaking down boundaries and not considering oneself as an independent entity. It has evolved into a system of sharing posts that do not reveal oneself, which is a far cry from the SNS where people were busy uploading the material they wanted to share at a specific place and at a specific time.
This change in SNS has raised concerns. Perhaps the biggest concern is whether communication in cyberspace is really communication at all. However, there is no need to worry about this. If we look at the evolution of SNS, we can see that users create their own identities in cyberspace and use SNS by exchanging posts with other people, and it has evolved into different forms depending on the user’s demand. In the early days of SNS, when the concept of friends was expanding, users were busy expanding their circle of friends and were in a hurry to get themselves known. However, the newer forms of SNS are less about showing off and more about sharing albums in an expanded space based on the whole world, which was created by users who were skeptical of the old forms of SNS, and more about spending less time online and more time in real life to create that identity.
As SNS has changed in cyberspace, so has the concept of communication within it. In the past, SNS communication was defined as exchanging greetings with friends on the Internet, asking and answering greetings in the same way as traditional communication. However, the current SNS was created in response to skepticism about exchanging greetings on the Internet, which was the role of SNS in the past, so it has changed to omit most of the content that was exchanged in traditional communication. So how do we communicate on SNS? Networked people around the world can now access content that they can’t see or feel directly, but indirectly, in the form of shared albums. Exchanging content can be thought of as communication in itself, and furthermore, exchanging one’s opinion about the content is a changed communication. In other words, it is a newly defined communication that allows people to search for information they want that they cannot get in the real world, quickly find only the parts they are interested in, and exchange opinions. In general, the criteria for judging the authenticity of communication is often compared to traditional communication in real-world relationships, but communication is different from real-world communication because it is changing according to the special environment of the Internet and the tastes of users, forming new definitions and meanings in itself.
Compared to talking to people in the real world, communication in cyberspace is definitely different. However, it is a communication that evolves along with the evolving SNS, so it has its own meaning and is forming a new area, and it is not a half communication compared to the communication in the real world, but a half communication that is building a new area with a different character from the traditional communication in the real world.
