SNSs help us maintain and expand our relationships across geographic and temporal boundaries, and various forms of social networking are playing an important role in creating new connections and preserving existing ones.
SNS stands for Social Network Service and refers to services that allow users to network on the web. They help people who are geographically or temporally separated from each other maintain relationships, and they also provide the ability to build new relationships with people they already know while preserving the ones they have.
Although the term social networking has only recently been coined, it’s a concept that has been around for a long time, given that the internet itself was created as a way to easily connect with people in distant places. Just as the invention of the wheel revolutionized transportation and led to the automobile, the wheel is to email what the automobile is to social media – each has evolved to serve a purpose, albeit in different ways.
With the advent of the World Wide Web, portals were created. Initially, they were not entrepreneurial in nature, but a boom in ventures to provide services over the Internet led to the launch of services such as iRoveSchool, Fritzal, and Whatsapp in 1999. Among them, iRoveSchool, which had the function of finding alumni who attended the same school, contributed a lot to the development of social networks by allowing members to raise money and give it to their alma mater in the form of scholarships and facilitating offline gatherings.
One of the most successful of these early social networking services was Facebook. It provided users with a personal space called a mini-homepage, making it accessible to people who didn’t have a homepage of their own, and organized their acquaintances into groups called “ilchon,” a concept familiar to Koreans, providing a prototype for current SNS. Cyworld was also linked to the messaging program Nateon, which functionally replaced MSN Messenger, which was the dominant messaging program in Korea for a time, making Nateon synonymous with messaging in Korea.
These indigenous social networks have recently seen a decline in users and influence. This is because the importation of SNSs used in Anglo-American countries has exposed the limitations of indigenous SNSs, and they are becoming obsolete. This is because the Internet real-name system, which was only practiced in Korea, restricted sign-ups, and the international expansion of connections that were once limited to Korea has led to the disadvantage that foreigners cannot use the service together. In addition, indigenous SNSs required the use of a specific browser, such as Internet Explorer, to fully use them, and various additional programs had to be installed before they could be used, which also contributed to the decline in market share as they were not adapted to the usage patterns of users using various browsers.
The introduction of foreign SNS can be seen as paralleling the introduction of smartphones in Korea. With the official release of the iPhone in Korea at the end of 2009, the paradigm of SNS use changed dramatically, as users could easily connect with friends and acquaintances through their smartphones from anywhere, unlike the existing domestic SNSs that could only be used through computers. As users could easily take and share photos and videos regardless of location and time, and receive responses in real time, Korean SNSs that were slow to respond to smartphone services lost subscribers to foreign SNSs. In particular, Lee Joo-sik, CEO of Whatsapp, said, “Our growth has slowed and stagnated due to our late response to the mobile market,” suggesting that the late response to foreign SNSs and the new SNS ecosystem was crucial.
Twitter and Facebook are two of the services that have become popular in Korea as indigenous SNSs have died out. These are lighter and more advanced forms of SNS that have evolved from the rise and fall of services such as MySpace, which was launched in 2004, making it more recent than Cyworld, which was launched in 1999. Twitter, in particular, has grown in popularity as it has been used as a promotional tool during election campaigns and actively utilized in broadcasting, while Facebook has grown in popularity with the increase in smartphone penetration in Korea, with the number of Facebook users now exceeding 10 million.
Twitter allows users to write within 140 characters, which is shared with people they are connected to through ‘following’, similar to the concept of first cousins in Facebook. Unlike Facebook, Twitter is very simple and intuitive to use, making it difficult to use without active, real-time interaction with users.
Compared to Twitter, Facebook offers more freedom. Users can customize their own ‘timeline’ and share videos, posts, photos, and comments with each other. These activities are also visible to people who are ‘friends’ with each other in real time, making it a more open and fast service compared to Cyworld.
In response to these market changes, Korea’s companies are also launching services such as WhatsApp and Hyundai, and Cyworld is also responding late by launching a smartphone-only app, but most of them are merely imitating large SNS such as Twitter and have not made a big impact due to the small number of users. This is due to the characteristics of the SNS market, which is characterized by the first-mover advantage: if a service is launched first and attracts a large number of subscribers, it takes a long time for users to switch to another service, making it easy to gain an advantage in the market. Therefore, rather than launching a new service, the market is developing by increasing subscribers by linking subscriber information based on existing SNS. For example, if you have a Facebook account, you can use most US-based services, including Skype, without having to sign up for anything.
These social networks are gaining traction because they provide an easy way to preserve connections that were previously difficult to maintain. They are becoming more accessible due to their simplicity of use, and their advantages are growing as smartphones are spreading evenly among the young and old, making it easier for many members of society to connect. They also have various new features in terms of forming new connections. The largest event held in Korea was “Tent24.” In the process of planning an event idea submitted by users in one community on the Internet, not only users from that community but also users from other communities collaborated through SNS. In the end, more than 2,000 people connected by social media gathered at an elementary school to watch the event, and the live broadcast on the Internet attracted more than 100,000 viewers, and the video was viewed more than 1 million times. Another example is singer Psy’s “Gangnam Style” music video, which, despite not promoting it overseas, garnered 160 million views on YouTube, the leading video site, thanks to sharing on social media. As a result, Psy appeared as a social media star on several TV programs in foreign countries, which is considered to be the biggest demonstration of the power of social media.
However, social media also has a negative side. It’s easy for people’s private lives to be exposed. Users are required to enter their personal information to sign up, which can be easily viewed by others, and it’s difficult for them to realize that they are doing so. Crimes have been committed by abusing this system to invade the privacy of others. In Taiwan, a man was arrested for stalking someone through Facebook, and in Korea, there have been many cases of witch-hunting people for doing something immoral on the subway, or posting criticisms of referees who made unfavorable decisions against Korea during the Olympics, or of opposing athletes who committed gross fouls in their personal space. In addition, there have been many incidents where people who are not fully aware of the highly influential features of SNS have spread falsehoods, or celebrities who have greater recognition than the general public have posted inappropriate content, causing them to be socially criticized.
However, recent technological advancements such as smartphones, telecommunications, and video technology have focused on services that make social networking more active, and the ever-growing SNS market has been developing by overcoming potential or revealed shortcomings. The connection between people that began with the invention of the telephone is reaching its peak with social networking, and it will be interesting to see how it evolves in the future. With new devices on the horizon, we can look forward to the emergence of new and convenient forms of socializing.
