Burns - Social Media: a Reference Handbook

Social Media

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Books in the Contemporary World Issues series address vital issues in todays society such as genetic engineering, pollution, and biodiversity. Written by professional writers, scholars, and nonacademic experts, these books are authoritative, clearly written, up-to-date, and objective. They provide a good starting point for research by high school and college students, scholars, and general readers as well as by legislators, businesspeople, activists, and others.

Each book, carefully organized and easy to use, contains an overview of the subject, a detailed chronology, biographical sketches, facts and data and/or documents and other primary source material, a forum of authoritative perspective essays, annotated lists of print and nonprint resources, and an index.

Readers of books in the Contemporary World Issues series will find the information they need in order to have a better understanding of the social, political, environmental, and economic issues facing the world today.

CONTEMPORARY WORLD ISSUES

A REFERENCE HANDBOOK

Kelli S. Burns

Copyright 2017 by ABC-CLIO, LLC

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Social Media: A Reference Handbook
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Control Number: 2016052707

ISBN: 978-1-4408-4355-6
EISBN: 978-1-4408-4356-3

21 20 19 18 17 1 2 3 4 5

This book is also available as an eBook.

ABC-CLIO
An Imprint of ABC-CLIO, LLC

ABC-CLIO, LLC
130 Cremona Drive, P.O. Box 1911
Santa Barbara, California 93116-1911
www.abc-clio.com

This book is printed on acid-free paper

Manufactured in the United States of America

Social media have infiltrated nearly every aspect of modern society, enhancing opportunities to maintain and build interpersonal relationships, connect businesses to customers, collect donations for causes, build online professional networks for job searching, and even fuel political revolutions. Users can access news from media organizations through social media or act as citizen journalists to create and distribute their own news. Support for social issues can be expressed through hashtags on Twitter, images on Facebook, or videos on YouTube. People also use social media to publish and access travel, restaurant, and product reviews; play interactive games; engage in political conversations; and connect with fellow fans of their favorite television shows. Social media have opened windows to users personal lives and made users obsess about the way they present themselves online. Consumers are increasingly buying products directly from social media sites, and marketers are diverting higher percentages of digital budgets to advertising on social media sites. Social media have produced new job opportunities, including social media marketers and online community managers, and some celebrities have risen to fame through social media. Furthermore, almost all industries have been impacted by the availability of social media, and new industries have emerged because of social media.

Behind the scenes, social media platforms and data companies are collecting the information users are sharing. The data are useful to marketers who target social media users with product advertising, political campaigns that want to encourage certain users to vote for their candidates, or hiring managers who are making decisions about job candidates. As a result, many users are becoming more concerned about how their data are being used.

Social media are a global phenomenon, with the Asia-Pacific region driving much of the growth. Worldwide, social media users grew 10 percent between 2015 and 2016 to 2.3 billion. During that time, social media users in the Asia-Pacific region increased 14 percent. Social media platforms are also increasingly being accessed from mobile devices. Between 2015 and 2016, active mobile social users grew 17 percent to almost 2 billion users (Kemp 2016).

As an inescapable part of our culture, social media have even had a profound impact on the English language. In 2014, the collegiate edition of the Merriam-Webster dictionary added the following Internet and social mediarelated words: selfie , hashtag , catfish , crowdfunding , digital divide , gamification , pay-wall , tweep , social networking , hot spot , and unfriend (Steinmetz 2014). In 2015, the unabridged version added clickbait , emoji , meme , NSFW (not safe/suitable for work), and photobomb (Iza-him 2015). Social media and tech words added in 2016 to the unabridged version included FoMO , an acronym for the fear of missing out, which impacts some social media users, and nomophobia , which is the fear of being without a cell phone (Steinmetz 2016).

This book has seven chapters that provide readers with an overview of the social media industry and references for social media resources. starts with a definition of social media and then outlines the history of the industry by focusing on the launch and growth of a variety of important platforms and technologies. The chapter concludes with a discussion of future trends in social media.

targeted for a variety of societal ills, including an unhealthy addiction to social media and feelings of depression, loneliness, and envy as people are exposed to the seemingly more fabulous lives of others. This envy may also drive people to feel pressure to project idealized versions of their own lives. People also worry about privacy issues and the potential for online shaming when people jump on the bandwagon to attack someone through social media. Parents are particularly concerned about cyberbullying, sexting, and online predators. Users can also be targeted by online scammers or tricked by hoaxes or fake news stories. Whether social media have a positive or negative impact on relationships and communication skills is also addressed. The curation process used by social media platforms may also affect users who are exposed to a narrow worldview. Finally, practical issues related to social media in the workplace are discussed.