chock-a-blog!

of Web Communications

Monday, June 15, 2009 0 comments

Let's face it: the internet has made communication easier. With chat rooms, voice over internet protocols (Voip) and emails, there should be no excuse from communicating with family and friends regardless of their location around the world. Today, two new forms of communication have emerged taking the world by a storm – social networking sites and micro blogging.

Parody of the Mac vs PC advert by Google and Facebook. Courtesy of Techcrunch.com.

Social Networking are defined as web sites that allows users to create profiles publicly or semi-publicly within a certain system which links the user to a number of other users that has a shared interest (Boyd, D.M & Ellison, N.B 2007). Microblogging is a networking service that allows Internet connected devices to stay abreast of activities within a group by receiving frequent published status updates, typically of 140 characters or less, answering the question 'What are you doing now?' (What is Microblogging 2009).

The advantage of these forms of communication is the ability to use multimodal forms when communicating. Multimodal texts according to Walsh (2006), is a combination of digital and printed text that comprises of more than one mode.

The social networking site Facebook allows for all sorts of interactivity amongst its users – photo sharing, video sharing, micro blogging and recently Facebook also allowed users to chat in real time with friends that are logged in. It is clear that monomodal texts are a thing of the past and multimodal texts where texts are not the dominant feature prevails.

Twitter is available on any internet devices including mobile phones.

Micro blogging site – a new phenomenon – allows users to be constantly updated on the ‘tweets’ that they follow. In a bold move, Ashton Kutcher made a public challenge to CNN.com for a race to reach 1 million followers, the winner of which will donate 10,000 mosquito bed nets to World Malaria Day (Oprah, Ashton Kutcher mark twitter turning point 2009). Followers of Kutcher’s twitter site soared – he won the race.

Privacy issue is the remains the major concern of these new communication tools. While it enable us to communicate to more people than ever before, users should filter the information they publish carefully and be wary of who they are communicating to. Despite this it is obvious, that social networking sites and micro blogging is here to stay.

References:

1. Boyd, d. m & Ellison, N. B 2007, Social network sites: Definition, history, and scholarship, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 13(1), article 11. viewed on 10 June 2008 <http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol13/issue1/boyd.ellison.html>

2. Oprah, Ashton Kutcher mark twitter turning point 2009, CNN, online, retrieved 5 June 2009, from http://edition.cnn.com/2009/TECH/04/17/ashton.cnn.twitter.battle/index.html.

3. Walsh, M 2006, ‘”Textual shift”: examining the reading process with print, visual and multimodal texts’, Australian journal of language and literacy, vol. 29, no 1, pp. 24-37.

4. What is Microblogging? 2009, online, retrieved 5 June 2009, from http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-microblogging.htm.