What Are Social Media?

While it can be difficult to apply a singular definition to social media, given that they are a fairly new form of media that is still growing, practitioners and researchers have offered several ways of describing the world of social media, including:

Ironically, social media are a throwback to an older era of the Internet (the 1980s to the early 1990s) when bulletin boards and personal Web pages served as platforms for users to exchange information with other users.13 Now, greater Internet bandwidth, inexpensive digital tools and mobile devices, and a generation willing to develop and share their own media content online have given rise to new kinds of social media. Social media have become a new distribution system for media as well, challenging the one-to-many model of traditional mass media with the many-to-many model of social media.

VideoCentral Mass Communication bedfordstmartins.com/mediaculture

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The Rise of Social Media

Media experts discuss how social media are changing traditional media.

Discussion: Some consider the new social media an extension of the very old oral form of communication. Do you agree or disagree with this view? Why or why not?