Social media has evolved from the early days of internet chat and blogging to today’s platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and more. They have had a tremendous impact on politics, economics, society, and culture by allowing users to communicate in real time, share information, and build communities. However, they also have negative effects, such as the exposure of personal information and the spread of misinformation. Social media is constantly evolving, including its positive aspects, such as the ability to deliver information quickly and give voice to marginalized groups.
Just a few years ago, no one would have imagined that checking Facebook’s newsfeed in the morning would become a part of everyone’s daily routine. Celebrity Twitter updates dominate headlines and internet news, and polling the public’s tweets on key agendas has become an important indicator in public opinion polls. Not long ago, The Social Network (2010), a movie about the success myth of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, made a huge social impact. These phenomena point to the growing influence of social networking services (SNS) in modern society. The term SNS has only recently begun to be used in journalism, and it’s actually used in a variety of ways. On the other hand, the term SNS, by definition, encompasses a very broad range of online services, and its meaning is still changing rapidly.
A social networking service (SNS) literally means a website, online service, or platform that allows social networks to form. In a broad sense, the term can include services such as blogs, online communities, messengers, email, personalized homepage platforms, and online friend recommendations, and most SNS providers offer a unique combination of these services to their users.
The concept of SNSs has been proposed for a long time, especially the concept of networking services based on communication between users through computers, which led to the development of primitive SNSs such as Usenet, ARPANET, and LISTSERV for military purposes in the mid-20th century. However, with the introduction of the World Wide Web (WWW) in the early 1990s, enabling computer networking across the globe, SNSs aimed at the general public emerged, such as Geocities (1994), Theglobe.com (1995), and Tripod.com (1995). These early SNSs mediated communication between users through simple chat features, provided convenient tools for document creation, or offered free personal homepage space on the Web, allowing users to share their ideas and personal information.
By the end of the 1990s, the user profile emerged as a key component of SNSs. At the core of this user profile was the ability for individuals to own and edit their friend lists. By this time, social network research was well underway, and many websites began to offer fairly advanced forms of friend list management and friend finding. This led to the emergence of a new generation of SNSs, including SixDegrees.com (1997), Makeoutclub (2000), HubCulture (2002), Friendster (2002), and others, and SNSs have since become a major part of Internet culture.
Myspace, a U.S.-based social networking site, followed, and by 2005 it had more page visits than the world’s largest portal, Google. Facebook, founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg, a young entrepreneur in his 20s, became the world’s largest social networking site in early 2009, and the number of users has grown exponentially since then, with an estimated 3.05 billion people using Facebook as of 2024.
Today’s social networking services take many forms. Twitter allows users to instantly post short, limited-length posts to the web, called tweets. These tweets are visible in real time to followers who decide to subscribe to their posts. Each user can also react to the tweet through the retweet feature, and forward the tweet to anyone they want through a feature called mention. The virality and impact of these short-form tweets is enormous, with celebrities with millions of followers having a Twitter presence that can rival that of a journalist.
Facebook, as we’ve seen, is characterized by a very advanced form of friend-finding. As a result, most Facebook users can easily organize a rich network of contacts through their friend list. Based on this, Facebook allows users to share information such as short articles, photos, and videos in real time, and also provides a messenger service that enables quick communication between users.
The domestic SNS is represented by Cyworld, which is provided by the portal site Nate. Cyworld offers “mini-homepages,” which are somewhat closed and concise personal homepages, and are considered to be excellent for sharing, editing, and managing photos. Cyworld also features colorful minihome designs that are commoditized and sold by component. This was a huge commercial success for the company, as users could purchase design elements as if they were shopping in a store and apply them to their mini-homes with a single click. It was also unique in that it gave familiar names to potentially unfamiliar social networking components. For example, friends on the friend list are called ‘ilchon’ and users can add their own nicknames to it, called ‘ilchon name’, and cyber money used to purchase design elements is called ‘acorn’. These neologisms played a major role in establishing the site as a new cultural code for the younger generation.
In addition, social media has had an enormous impact on politics, economics, society, and culture. Politicians actively utilize social media to promote their policies and communicate with their supporters, and economically, companies use social media to efficiently market and manage their customers. Social media is also being used as a platform for cultural exchange and social movements. Many recent social issues, such as environmental protection movements and human rights movements, have been widely publicized and gathered supporters through social media.
Recently, new social services have emerged that are derived from the concept of SNS. Examples include social shopping services, which analyze the vast amount of personal information provided by SNS to provide users with shopping information, and social commerce, which lowers the marketing costs of merchants by collectively purchasing from a large number of people on the web, thus providing price benefits to consumers.
The generalization of SNS has made our lives faster and more convenient, but there are also concerns about its side effects. First of all, SNS has the disadvantage of easily exposing personal information online. This can be especially dangerous because personal information on social media is not just about your identity, but also includes photos, videos, and social networks. Another disadvantage is the spread of false information. Since information on social media is produced by individuals, its reliability is not always guaranteed. However, the power of social media is unprecedented, so false information can spread quickly and cause social chaos. Finally, the amount of information that can be conveyed on social media is usually limited, which means that emotions can be conveyed rather than an accurate understanding of the facts.
Despite these negative effects, the positive aspects of social media cannot be ignored. For example, the rapid sharing of information in emergency situations can help save lives. The role of social media as a space for marginalized groups to be heard and empathized with is also noteworthy. Social media will continue to evolve as a place where diverse voices can be respected and communicated.
SNS is constantly expanding its influence in the modern information society, and social services based on SNS have brought about a major paradigm shift in the IT ecosystem as well as the existing industrial structure. We are already living in an era where we can spread our voice to the whole world by just turning on our computers, and each of us is a media.
