How did social media become so embedded in our daily lives?

Social networks like Facebook and Twitter have changed the way we communicate and utilized mobile platforms to become services used by billions of people around the world. With social media comes a host of issues, including the speed of information dissemination, increased personal influence, and privacy concerns.

 

“Facebook was not built from the ground up to be a company. It was founded to fulfill a social mission: to make the world a more open and connected place.” Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder and CEO, wrote in the company’s initial public offering filing with the U.S. SEC on February 1, 2012. As of 2024, Facebook is the leading social networking service (SNS) with more than 3 billion users worldwide, excluding China, where it is not available. In addition to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and many other SNSs are available, and people wake up looking for SNSs and go to sleep looking for SNSs. Businesses are marketing on social media, and politicians are trying to utilize social media to their advantage. But what is it about social media that makes it so deeply embedded in our lives and connects us to the world?
A social network service (SNS) is an online service, platform, or site designed to bring together people with common interests, activities, backgrounds, or real-life connections to build and maintain social connections or relationships. SNSs consist of each user’s personal information, their social links, and a number of additional services. SNS is often used interchangeably with online community services, but technically, SNS is an individual-centered service, which is different from online community services, which are group-centered services. SNSs allow users to share thoughts, activities, events, interests, etc. through their personal networks.
SNS, which is considered a relatively new media, was already in shape in the mid-1990s. At that time, many SNS sites such as AOL (America On-Line), GeoCities, sixDegrees.com, Friendster, MySpace, LinkedIn, Second Life, and Korea’s Cyworld and Iloveschool were competing to become the mainstream of web-based SNS. However, with the advent of Twitter and Facebook in 2006, all of them, except LinkedIn, went into decline or continued their reputation by providing other services such as games, media, and advertising. As a result, the SNS market is currently a three-way battle between Twitter, which has the advantage of simplicity that allows users to quickly and easily deliver concise messages of 140 characters or less; Facebook, which has the largest number of users with a real-name system; and LinkedIn, which is a business SNS. So how did Twitter and Facebook, which came late to the party, manage to dominate the social networking market?
The reason why Twitter and Facebook have been able to steal so many users from other SNSs is because they have adapted to paradigm shifts. First, they adapted to and led the way in changing the way we communicate. Whereas traditional social networks require users to visit your space to see and comment on your posts, Twitter and Facebook moved toward a “microblogging” model where you post to your space and everyone who links to you can see and comment on your posts. They also chose to be concise, so that their timelines would rotate quickly, making it feel more like a chat. Second, unlike other SNSs that mainly used the web platform, it adapted well to changes in devices and media by utilizing mobile platforms such as smartphones that had begun to spread at that time. As a result, users could enjoy SNSs anytime and anywhere without accessing the web, and their loyalty to the SNS was bound to increase. Third, there is no burden on users to use the service, which means that it is designed to create added value just by using the SNS, adapting to the paradigm of modern society where the network becomes a resource.
One of the biggest advantages of SNS is the rapid transmission of information. According to the “six levels of separation theory” (although the term “six levels of separation” was not used in Stanley Milgram’s paper), which is known as “The Small World Problem” published in Psychology Today in 1967 by Stanley Milgram, a professor of psychology at Harvard University, if a relationship between two people who know each other is defined as a “link,” there are, on average, 5.2 links connecting two random people. In other words, it only takes an average of six steps for me to connect with a random person. While Professor Stanley Milgram’s experiment was conducted through letters, social networks allow us to communicate with random people much more quickly. This has shortened the distance between us and celebrities, giving us the opportunity to communicate with anyone we choose. It also means that the information you create and post can spread quickly.
Social media uses a form of empathy to convey information. For example, on Facebook, there’s a feature called “Like,” which means that if one of your friends likes something you write, all of their friends will see it. Assuming that each person has about 200 friends, and you have 50 mutual friends, that means that 350 people will see your post with one Like. Twitter also uses a device called RT (ReTweet) to spread information quickly. The difference is that Facebook is a horizontal relationship where you have to agree to be friends with each other to create a link, while Twitter is a vertical relationship where you can only see the posts of people you follow, but not the posts of people you’ve been followed. Therefore, Facebook is more likely to spread information widely, while Twitter is more likely to spread information from top to bottom. Therefore, Facebook is better at spreading information between acquaintances and Twitter is better at spreading information about celebrities. However, both SNSs have adapted to each other’s strengths and complemented them to develop their services.
Thanks to the aforementioned empathy device, social networks have increased the influence of individuals, allowing them to share the same things with strangers and create a bond of empathy. (This is why the Chinese government, a communist country, currently refuses to allow Facebook and Twitter to operate in China.) Moreover, the average number of links between Facebook users is 3.57, according to the Facebook data team’s analysis of 2.2 billion friendships as of 2024, which means that the distance between two random people on social networks has become even closer.
In general, our relationships are organized into clusters. In simple terms, a cluster is a group of people with the same attributes, and people connected by links are more likely to know someone at the same time. When people who know each other form clusters on social media, it’s easy to keep in touch with people you’ve lost touch with, and you can visibly see which cluster you’re in. It’s also a great way to keep in touch with people you’ve lost touch with, and you can visibly see the clusters you belong to.
However, social networks aren’t all good for society. The biggest problem is the lack of privacy. As you can see from the statistics above, the average number of links between two random people on social networks is 3.57. This means that it only takes an average of four people to access a random person’s information. This makes it easier for so-called “identity theft” to take place on the internet. In addition, users enter a certain amount of personal information on social media, which is so easily published and shared that they may unintentionally reveal information they would rather keep hidden. This is especially true for relationship status.
Social media also increases the influence of individuals and speeds up the spread of information, making it easier for misinformation and rumors to spread. In 2010, before the summer vacation season, a tweet was spread on Twitter with false information that said, “If you have a heart attack, don’t panic for 10 seconds before you lose consciousness, but breathe deeply while coughing loudly every two seconds to compress your heart to keep blood circulating and oxygen in your lungs to save yourself.” In response, Dr. Taeho Noh, a professor of cardiology at Seoul St. Mary’s Hospital, said, “I am a professor of cardiology and teach CPR. Not only is it completely unfounded, but it wastes precious initial fluids,” he said, warning of the dangers of such misinformation. As such, misinformation spread through social media can threaten our lives, so it’s important for users to be able to recognize it.
SNSs are making efforts to solve the above problems by allowing users to set the scope of disclosure of personal information and posts, receiving reports of misinformation, imposing sanctions, and enlisting the help of cyber investigators, but they are not perfect, so users should continue to make efforts to protect their personal information.
With the advancement of network theory and the development of mobile devices, SNS has become an inseparable paradigm in our lives. Even now, new SNS are appearing one after another, and the age range of people using SNS is expanding, from children to the elderly, and the number of users is steadily increasing. However, it is also true that the SNS industry is not performing satisfactorily compared to its size. This is because they are free for users and generate revenue mainly through advertising fees. Moreover, as more and more users are using social media on mobile devices, the fact that it cannot serve ads to mobile users due to the small screen size of the devices has exposed the vulnerability of the business. Facebook’s stock price, once a threat to Google, has been halved, revealing that the value of the social media industry was a bubble. Moreover, the industry is actually in crisis, as more users are leaving social media because they don’t find it useful than joining. Now, the surviving SNS companies will have to continue to explore new avenues using the fallen SNSs as a model. In the process, SNS companies will demand more personal information from users, so users themselves will have to continue to make efforts to protect their personal information.