Introduction
Internet social media has become the largest and fastest-growing media market in the 21st century. Over 4 billion people worldwide have social media accounts (Ortner et al., 2018). And about 60% of that number are avid social media users (Ortner et al., 2018). The creation of platforms like Facebook and Youtube, and other similar online entities had a tremendous impact on humanity and the lives of individual citizens, allowing them to exchange information much faster and without the threat of potential censorship. At the same time, the creation of these technologies also affected its users on a biological scale. The purpose of this essay is to evaluate and analyze the creation and development of internet social media through the lenses of history and humanities.
Lens Analysis
Historical Lens
The historical lens largely concerns itself with what happened and reasons for it, establishing correlations and causality connections between different events. From a historical perspective, social media is a natural development of other forms of media, which is a process largely formulated by the development and technology (Haustein et al., 2016). Previous forms of information dissemination, such as newspapers, radio, TV, and others, were considered great breakthroughs at their time, all of them gradually increasing the visibility, availability, and representability of media. Newspapers became a viable concept after creating the printing press, which enabled the masses access to information in general – something previously available only in rare and expensive books (Haustein et al., 2016). However, that form of media was limited by how fast it was capable of reaching the receivers. Radio media surpassed that obstacle, able to supply news directly to the users with great speeds of radio waves, but struggled to transmit visual information. That milestone was surpassed by television, which enabled the users to receive both visual and audio information at their convenience. Likewise, modern internet social media came as a logical development from creating the Internet (Haustein et al., 2016). It is superior to TV in a way that it allows for viewers to not only receive the information but actively create and distribute it, allowing for proactivity.
Humanities Lens
The humanities lens concerns itself with viewing the subject through the prism of a wide range of subjects and disciplines. Some of these include art, literature, philosophy, and others (Ortner et al., 2018). From the perspective of the humanities lens, social media can be viewed as an art form. Its use of visual design, humor, memes and other uses could convey both an art message, a representation of personal and collective systems of values, as well as political stances on various issues (Haustein et al., 2016). At the same time, these representations would mirror and be heavily influenced by the times that produced them, as could be seen in the gradual evolution of the meme culture between 2000-2021, with memes reflecting the values of the society in relation to events occurring in the particular time periods.
Conclusion
From the perspectives of history and humanities, internet social media is an amalgamation of cultural values, historical events, and the technological development of society. As it stands, it is currently the most advanced form of media available, combining all of the benefits of previous forms with an opportunity to directly engage with content creators or be creators on one’s own. It is likely to evolve further, engaging other senses and following the trends of cultural and technological development. Analyzing the development of social media through these two lenses would enable to project of its growth and trends in the future.
References
Haustein, S., Bowman, T. D., & Costas, R. (2016). Interpreting “altmetrics”: viewing acts on social media through the lens of citation and social theories. Theories of Informetrics and Scholarly Communication, 5(2), 372-406.
Ortner, C., Sinner, P., & Jadin, T. (2018). The history of online social media. The SAGE Handbook of Web History, 7(11), 372-384.