Response to the US NOW documentary and this week’s readings.
The documentary explains the relationship between people and social media. The emergence of social media has changed how society functions. It has become a part of everyday life and ‘reconstituting’ what ‘government’ is [Us Now].The US Now documentary shows the many uses of social media. One include social media providing a larger social scale in replacement of family and friends and also influencing how we interact with social issues and also acquaintances. Others are online banking, cheaper products sold online (Ebay) new ways of public service, creating large communities and online personalized content (Youtube) and social media ’empowers users to produce their own content to become producers’ [Hinton and Hjorth, 2013]. According to Hinton and Hjorth, Social media ‘provides new avenues for dissemination and engagement’.
Social media is a ‘big shift’ and there’s this idea that everyone becomes an active participant, and also at the same time replacing old social-relationship models, re-establishing them which according to Hinton and hjorth is the change between what is public and what is private, with social media ‘making private things public’ [Hinton and Hjorth, 2013]. US Now states that there is the availability of selection through social media, and filtering content, allowing people to share ‘wisdom’ such as critiquing music, and also ‘develop a voice which also eludes regulation by authorities can lead to a significant positive’ [Hinton and Hjorth]. This decides what music goes up the charts / becomes popular. It also allows minorities that are unheard to have a chance to be heard. Many people starting companies and businesses want to ‘commercialize the web’, and this is often called Web 2.0. However, the realization of using social media for business is not as easy as it seems because in many cases they do not work out. One of the examples is MSN who started out great but then in the end MSN closed down and Windows Live Messenger was no longer available for use. MSN closed, ‘leaving large holes in the stock market’ and in other cases ‘dotcoms vanished as fast as they had appeared’ [Hinton and Hjorth, 2013]. In the documentary it is mentioned that political campaigns utilize social media. This is because they are ‘becoming interested in social media as a way to engage more directly with citizens’ [Hinton and Hjorth, 2013].
The documentary uses the example of Wikipedia as a user-generated content that is very successful and beneficial for internet users. It is highlighted that these are one of the wonderful merits of using online media. With social media and the internet certainly there are problems that arise from the use of it, instead of making the world better. Some problems are when ‘trust’ between people who communicate online don’t work as they were expected, like in cases shown in the documentary, cases of cyber bullying, pedophiles on the internet, con-artists online, etc. That is why it was mentioned that our view of the internet and online media should not be too ‘utopian’ but it definitely has a chance to be used for bigger things that can be beneficial.