Essay 1

Social Media: threat or opportunity?

By Homayoun Derakhshan

Network-based media that depends on user generated data is a paramount important issue these days. Everyone is using some kind of social media and communicate with other people in a sense that maybe he doesn’t even know. Instant messaging, Facebooking, blogging, or etc, are just some examples of using social media everyday in our life.

For me, social media usage is rather normal, not too much or too low. However, I always want to do it more like everyday blogging, enjoying flickr, or del.icio but unfortunately I cannot do that due to unknown problems which cause always lack of time for me to do so.

I use social media mainly as a mean to communicate with my friends through social network websites and sometimes instant messaging. Using social networks is a good tool to be in touch with your peers around the world with just a click, seeing what they do, their new photos, relationships, and how they are. Sometimes it may help you to improve your career or even find a better job just by chance. When “information is power” nowadays, so being in a networked place is potentially of vital importance for you to have an easier life.

Moreover, I utilize forums when I am looking for something in the internet that is hard to find related information. When you have problem with a device e.g. your mobile phone and you can not find your answer in the related websites, then the best place to find your answer is a forum and see how other people like you with the same problem could solve their problem. It is a very useful tool to use but we should be moral in some extent to participate in those forums afterwards if we find a better solution.

In my point of view, social media is getting larger and improved day by day and is a great opportunity for the future. There are a lot of ideas if we think deeply in order to utilize user generated data in a new way to make a new concept in this area. Just imagine that you could be the idea inventor of Skype or Facebook. There are a lot of opportunities out there for us to think about and develop. People want to express themselves and be in a networked situation psychologically because human is a social creature. People want to be famous and well-respected among their acquaintances or even unknown people and they try to express themselves in a way to fulfill this feeling. For us as professionals in this area, it is a good business opportunity to find new ideas and participate in improving this area and also making a good lucrative business out of it.

Every opportunity has its own threats as well. In the contrary of great advantages of social media technologies, there are some disadvantages which are considerable. The main differences of traditional mass media and social-online media is that everyone with every kind of thinking can create whatever he wants without any editorial observation. However, it is an improvement towards getting rid of censorship but it can be dangerous in some aspects like making propagandas to mislead people in a way that you want and bias their thoughts toward a fake issue.

Another threat can be bankruptcy of traditional media because of losing their customer in long-term. Since the user generated data doesn’t have the high quality and it is amateur-based, it doesn’t have the required quality to replace the previous mass media. Therefore, it may affect itself in long-run and makes people lose their interest in entertaining media as a whole which results in destroying a very lucrative business.