Aided by faster microprocessors, high-speed broadband networks, and a proliferation of digital content, the Internet has become more than just an information source in its third decade as a mass medium. The third generation of the Internet is a much more robust and social environment, having moved toward being a fully interactive medium with user-created content like blogs, Tumblrs, YouTube videos, Flickr photostreams, Photobucket albums, social networking, and other collaborative sites. In the words of law professor and media scholar Lawrence Lessig, we have moved from a “Read/Only” culture on the Internet, in which users can only read content, to a “Read/Write” culture, in which users have the power not only to read content but also to develop their own.10 It’s the users who ultimately rule here, sharing the words, sounds, images, and creatively edited music remixes and mash-up videos that make these Web communities worth visiting.

Social media are new digital media platforms that engage users to create content, add comments, and interact with others. 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.

Types of Social Media

In less than a decade, a number of different types of social media have evolved, with multiple platforms for the creation of user-generated content. European researchers Andreas M. Kaplan and Michael Haenlein identify six categories of social media on the Internet: blogs, collaborative projects, content communities, social networking sites, virtual game worlds, and virtual social worlds.11

Blogs

Years before there were status updates or Facebook, blogs enabled people to easily post their ideas to a Web site. Popularized with the release of Blogger (now owned by Google) in 1999, blogs contain articles or posts in chronological, journal-like form, often with reader comments and links to other sites. Blogs can be personal or corporate multimedia sites, sometimes with photos, graphics, podcasts, and video. Some blogs have developed into popular news and culture sites, such as the Huffington Post, TechCrunch, Mashable, Gawker, HotAir, ThinkProgress, and TPM Muckraker.

Blogs have become part of the information and opinion culture of the Web, giving regular people and citizen reporters a forum for their ideas and views, and providing a place for even professional journalists to informally share ideas before a more formal news story gets published. Some of the leading platforms for blogging include Blogger, WordPress, Tumblr, Weebly, and Wix. But by 2013, the most popular form of blogging was microblogging, with about 241 million active users on Twitter, sending out 500 million tweets (a short message with a 140-character limit) per day.12 In 2013, Twitter introduced an app called Vine that enabled users to post short video clips. A few months later, Facebook’s Instagram responded with its own video-sharing service.

Collaborative Projects

Another Internet development involves collaborative projects in which users build something together, often using wiki (which means “quick” in Hawaiian) technology. Wiki Web sites enable anyone to edit and contribute to them. There are several large wikis, such as Wikitravel (a global travel guide), Wikimapia (combining Google Maps with wiki comments), and WikiLeaks (an organization publishing sensitive documents leaked by anonymous whistleblowers). WikiLeaks gained notoriety for its release of thousands of United States diplomatic cables and other sensitive documents beginning in 2010 (see “Examining Ethics: WikiLeaks, Secret Documents, and Good Journalism on page 506). But the most notable wiki is Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia launched in 2001 that is constantly updated and revised by interested volunteers. All previous page versions of Wikipedia are stored, allowing users to see how each individual topic develops. The English version of Wikipedia is the largest, containing over four million articles, but Wikipedias are also being developed in 287 other languages.

Businesses and other organizations have developed social media platforms for specific collaborative projects. Tools like Basecamp and Podio provide social media interfaces for organizing project and event-planning schedules, messages, to-do lists, and workflows. Kickstarter is a popular fund-raising tool for creative projects like books, recordings, and films. InnoCentive is a crowd-sourcing community that offers award payments for people who can solve business and scientific problems. And Change.org has become an effective petition project to push for social change. For example, in 2013 Lucien Tessier of Maryland began a campaign to petition the Boy Scouts of America (BSA) to drop its ban against openly gay scouts. After nearly 130,000 people signed the Change.org petition, and after additional lobbying by others, the BSA dropped its ban on gay scouts under the age of eighteen.13

Content Communities

Content communities are the best examples of the many-to-many ethic of social media. Content communities exist for the sharing of all types of content, from text (FanFiction.net) to photos (Flickr, Photobucket) and videos (YouTube, Vimeo). YouTube, created in 2005 and bought by Google in 2006, is the most well-known content community, with hundreds of millions of users around the world uploading and watching amateur and professional videos. YouTube gave rise to the viral video—a video that becomes immediately popular by millions sharing it through social media platforms. The most popular video of all time—Psy’s 2012 music video “Gangnam Style”—has more than 2.2 billion views. In 2014, YouTube reported that one hundred hours of video are uploaded to the site every minute, and it has more than one billion unique users each month.

Social Networking Sites

Perhaps the most visible examples of social media are social networking sites like Facebook, LiveJournal, Pinterest, Orkut, LinkedIn, and Google+. On these sites, users can create content, share ideas, and interact with friends and colleagues.

Facebook is the most popular social media site on the Internet. Started at Harvard in 2004 as an online substitute to the printed facebooks the school created for incoming first-year students, Facebook was instantly a hit and soon eclipsed MySpace as the leading social media destination. The site enables users to construct personal profiles, upload photos, share music lists, play games, and post messages to connect with old friends and meet new ones. Originally, access was restricted to college students, but in 2006 the site expanded to include anyone. Soon after, Facebook grew at an astonishing rate, and by 2014 it had 1.3 billion active users and was available in more than seventy languages.

In 2011, Google introduced Google+, a social networking interface designed to compete with Facebook. Google+ enables users to develop distinct “circles,” by dragging and dropping friends into separate groups, rather than having one long list of friends. In response, Facebook created new settings to enable users to control who sees their posts.

Virtual Game Worlds and Virtual Social Worlds

Virtual game worlds and virtual social worlds invite users to role-play in rich 3-D environments, in real time, with players throughout the world. In virtual game worlds (also known as massively multiplayer online role-playing games, or MMORPGs) such as World of Warcraft and Elder Scrolls Online, players can customize their online identity, or avatar, and work with others through the game’s challenges. Community forums for members extend discussion and shared play outside of the game. Virtual social worlds, like Second Life, enable players to take their avatars through simulated environments and even make transactions with virtual money. (See Chapter 3 for a closer look at virtual game worlds and virtual social worlds.)

Social Media and Democracy

In just a decade, social media have changed the way we consume and relate to media and the way we communicate with others. Social media tools have put unprecedented power in our hands to produce and distribute our own media. We can share our thoughts and opinions, write or update an encyclopedic entry, start a petition or fund-raising campaign, post a video, and create and explore virtual worlds. But social media have also proven to be an effective tool for democracy and for undermining repressive regimes that thrive on serving up propaganda and hiding their atrocities from view.

The wave of protests in more than a dozen Arab nations in North Africa and the Middle East that began in late 2010 resulted in four rulers being forced from power by mid-2012. The Arab Spring began in Tunisia, with a twenty-six-year-old street vendor named Mohamed Bouazizi, who had his vegetable cart confiscated by police. Humiliated when he tried to get it back, he set himself on fire. While there had been protests before in Tunisia, the stories were never communicated widely. This time, protesters posted videos on Facebook, and satellite news networks spread the story with reports based on those videos. The protests spread across Tunisia, and in January 2011, Tunisia’s dictator of nearly twenty-four years fled the country.

In Egypt, a similar circumstance occurred when twenty-eight-year-old Khaled Said was pulled from a café and beaten to death by police. Said’s fate might have made no impact but for the fact that his brother used his mobile phone to snap a photo of Said’s disfigured face and released it to the Internet. The success of protesters in Tunisia spurred Egyptians to organize their own protests, using the beating of Said as a rallying point. During the pro-democracy gatherings at Tahrir Square in Cairo, protesters used social media like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube to stay in touch. Global news organizations tracked the protesters’ feeds to stay abreast of what was happening, especially because the state news media ignored the protests and carried pro-Mubarak propaganda. Even though Egyptian leader Hosni Mubarak tried to shut down the Internet in Egypt, word of the protests spread quickly, and he was out eighteen days after the demonstrations started. In 2013, more protests aided by social media led to the ouster of Mohamed Morsi, Mubarak’s democratically elected successor. In Yemen and Libya, other dictators were ousted. And although Syria’s repressive government was still in power in 2014 after years of protests and fighting, citizens continued to use social media to provide evidence of the government’s killing thousands of civilians.

Even in the United States, social media have helped call attention to issues that might not have received any media attention otherwise. In 2011 and 2012, protesters in the Occupy Wall Street movement in New York and at hundreds of sites across the country took to Twitter, Tumblr, YouTube, and Facebook to point out the inequalities of the economy and the income disparity between the wealthiest 1 percent and the rest of the population—the 99 percent. The physical occupations didn’t last, but the movement changed the discourse in the United States about economic inequality.14

The flexible and decentralized nature of the Internet and social media is in large part what makes them such powerful tools for subverting control. In China, the Communist Party has tightly controlled mass communication for decades. As more and more Chinese citizens take to the Internet, an estimated thirty thousand government censors monitor or even block Web pages, blogs, chat rooms, and e-mails. Social media sites like Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, WordPress, and Blogger have frequently been blocked, and Google moved its Chinese search engine (Google.cn) to Hong Kong after the Chinese government repeatedly censored it. And for those who persist in practicing “subversive” free speech, there can be severe penalties: Paris-based Reporters without Borders reports that thirty Chinese journalists and seventy-four netizens were in prison in 2014 for writing articles and blogs that criticized the government.15 Still, Chinese dissenters bravely play cat-and-mouse with Chinese censors, using free services like Hushmail, Freegate, and Ultrasurf (the latter two produced by Chinese immigrants in the United States) to break through the Chinese government’s blockade. (For more on using the Internet for political and social statements, see “Examining Ethics: The ‘Anonymous’ Hackers of the Internet” on pages 50–51.)