This article covers the definition, characteristics, and various use cases of social media, and discusses the benefits of using social media for personal and business purposes, as well as the negative effects, such as invasion of privacy, spread of misinformation, viruses, and social media addiction.

“I’ve made a connection,” “I’ve written on the wall,” “I’m on the street,” and so on. Just a few years ago, these conversations were unheard of, but somehow we’ve become accustomed to them. We also hear about celebrities and politicians tweeting their thoughts and making waves or making news. Terms such as “cousin,” “wall,” and “Twitter” were created by social media. Most people in the modern world have heard or experienced the term social media at some point in their lives, so they are familiar with it in the abstract, but not many people really know what it means. As a new type of system that emerged only a few years ago, it’s hard to know what exactly it is unless you’re really interested in it. So in this article, we’ll take a look at what SNSs are, what their characteristics are, how they’re used, and what the problems are.

Introduction

SNS, short for Social Network Service, is a community-type website created for the purpose of building online connections. Some of the most popular examples of SNSs are Cyworld in South Korea, Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace in the United States. In short, these are sites that allow you to communicate with other people through the internet with your own personal account and media. People get satisfaction from interacting with others and building connections through their own personal media. SNS is about connecting with people online in your own name, making friends, forming groups, and sharing information and opinions with each other. Unlike traditional websites, SNSs make it easy to share and view information and accounts not only of your friends, but also of people who are far away from you.

Characteristics and Use Cases of SNSs

According to Gene Smith, SNSs have seven characteristics.
First, SNSs are characterized by presence. You can make yourself known to others through social media. When you post posts, photos, etc. on SNS, you are not only expressing yourself to others, but also appealing to others to pay attention to your presence. The Harvard Crimson, Harvard University’s student newspaper, put it this way. “Facebook is based on a primal human instinct. Everyone has a sense of belonging, a little vanity, and a certain amount of voyeurism.” SNSs like Facebook fulfill this need to be seen, to make yourself known.
Second, social media is about sharing. SNSs are characterized by the fact that anyone can easily use and share the content they create. Even if you don’t create specific content, you can share information you know about each other or share your opinions. Furthermore, people can share or discuss what they think about important events.
Third, social networks are conversational in nature. Communication is a key feature of social media because the idea of social media is to create connections and communities between people. Sharing opinions between people can also be considered communication, and contact and contact with each other can be considered communication within SNS.
Fourth, SNSs make it easy to form and create groups. Examples are the club system on Facebook or groups on Facebook. Groups create a sense of belonging for the members of the group, making them feel satisfied online, where they might otherwise feel isolated. This sense of belonging, just like in real life, is one of the things that makes people so enthusiastic about social media.
Fifth, social media has the properties of publicity and reputation. Similar to the nature of existence, you can make yourself known to others by revealing your information or abilities on social media, or by promoting yourself.
Sixth, the attribute of relation in SNS can solve the relationship deficiency of modern people by forming relationships with others. By constantly connecting and communicating with other people, we can feel the same connection online that we feel in real life.
Finally, social media is about identity. By using a personal account, you can feel like you are speaking for yourself, and you can continue to be in control of yourself online, as you are responsible for your own words and actions on SNS.

Impact and Examples of SNS

SNSs with such diverse attributes are currently being used in various ways, whether or not their developers intended them to be.
Basically, SNS are used by the majority of individual users. Facebook, the most famous of the SNS sites, currently has about 3 billion monthly active users. About 2.1 billion of them use Facebook on a daily basis. That’s one-third of the world’s population using Facebook on a daily basis. Although SNSs are used for many things, the most important use is by individuals. Most people use social media for networking and communication. They consider this to be their primary purpose for using social media. In addition to connecting with acquaintances, individuals also use social media to communicate with an unspecified number of people. They post their views and situations on social media to get more people to agree with them, and they conduct polls.
On the other hand, celebrities use social media to express their thoughts and communicate with their public. Many politicians and political parties use social media to express their ideas, ideologies, etc. to attract supporters and get them to agree with them. You can find countless articles and news stories on the internet about politicians expressing their ideas or positions on social media. There is no better tool for politicians to express their thoughts than social media. They can easily and quickly communicate their positions, rally their supporters, sway public opinion in their favor, and receive criticism and evaluation. Similarly, social media is a way for celebrities to interact with their fans and close the distance between them and the general public. Fans comment on the celebrity’s posts, and the celebrity responds to the comments, which is a way for the celebrity to get closer to the fans and become more approachable.

Business uses of social media

Social networks are also very important and used by businesses. This is especially true for marketing. Some companies use social media to advertise directly (through banners on social media sites), while others use it to generate good reviews of their products and make them go viral. In addition, they can also promote events such as free coupons or create their own company page on social media to spread the word about their company to many people. For example, if you’re on social media, you’ll often see coffee companies giving out coupons for free coffee, or you’ll see a promotion from a company on your account and you’ll like it and friend them. In practice, this marketing strategy works very well. In the U.S., Dell generated $6.5 million in sales from Twitter alone in the two years since it launched its Twitter account.
Social media has also impacted business in other ways beyond marketing, such as a new type of business called social commerce. A social commerce company is an intermediary that allows a product to be sold cheaply for a limited time and in large quantities when a certain number of customers sign up to buy it. Some examples of social commerce companies include Coupang and Ticketmaster. The driving force behind these social commerce companies is the increase in customers through social media. The goal of social commerce companies is to attract a large number of customers through word of mouth using social media when a good or cheap product is posted. In other words, social media has created a new business called social commerce, and the business is maintained through social media.

Problems with SNS

Despite these various features and uses of SNS, there is a dark side. First of all, your privacy is easily violated through SNS. SNS is your online self. They make it easy for people to look at other people’s information and accounts. It’s not uncommon for people to find out about other people’s information even if they don’t want to. It’s like being naked, but with the downside that a lot of people’s information is easily exposed. It’s not uncommon for a celebrity to accidentally post an intimate photo of themselves on social media, or for a conversation with a friend to go viral. The ease with which information is shared and made available can be both an advantage and a disadvantage.
It’s also easy for false or misleading facts to spread quickly on social media. For example, it’s not uncommon for interesting topics to be shared that are not true, such as celebrity scandals or gossip, which can quickly become misleading. In addition to misinformation, sometimes witch hunts are also easy to create. Examples include the case of the soup girl who accidentally burned her child’s face with hot water and was witch-hunted on social media by her mother, who claimed that it was someone else’s fault, and the case of the witch-hunt against Chae Seon Dang, in which a pregnant woman who was assaulted by a staff member at Chae Seon Dang restaurant falsely claimed that she was assaulted. SNS is a very fast and easy way to communicate information, but the harm of misinformation is serious.
Recently, there has also been a serious problem of viruses caused by SNS. Just as information is easily and quickly transmitted through social media, viruses have recently been spreading easily and quickly through social media. When someone distributes a virus through social media, many social media users will encounter it just like they encounter other information through social media. Without realizing that what is being distributed is a virus, people view the information and become infected with the virus. It doesn’t stop there: the infected person becomes a host, like a zombie, and spreads the virus to others.

Addiction and social impact of social networks

The problems caused by social networks are not only physical, but also mental. Social media addiction is a prime example. In fact, social media addiction is a serious problem. According to Forbes, a study conducted by Professor Hoffman at the University of Chicago, which examined the addictive patterns of 205 adults in Würzburg, Germany, found that social media is the third most addictive after sleep and sex. It’s not uncommon to see people who feel anxious if they don’t check their social media for a while, and are constantly reaching for their phones to check them. People who are addicted to social media are obsessed with the anxiety of wondering if someone has contacted them or if they’ve missed something new. The addictive nature of social media makes people obsessed with it, consumes their time, and distracts them from their work.

Conclusion

In this article, we’ve discussed the definition and characteristics of social media, as well as the different uses and dysfunctions. Despite their short history, social networks have had a huge impact. They are easily and quickly available to everyone and are used by the vast majority of humanity, and they have many features and uses. Unfortunately, there are not only positive features, but also negative ones. Often, it’s the dysfunctions that have the biggest impact on society. Fortunately, there is a lot of work being done to prevent these dysfunctions from causing harm. Social media companies are modifying their sites to improve security and reduce invasions of privacy, and there are ongoing efforts to protect privacy at the national level. In addition, a few witch hunts have made conscious citizens realize the seriousness of the spread of misinformation on social media, and they are vigilant and working to stop it.
As you can see, social media is an important part of our lives. We need to continue to make efforts to harness the positive aspects and minimize the negative effects. While social media can enrich our relationships and communication, we need to be careful to ensure the reliability of information and the privacy of individuals. This will allow us to maximize the benefits of social media.