Connected

Over the years, we have seen the development of social media from being a fundamental tool for content sharing and collaborative creations to turning into a significant part of the present media landscape. A global web index survey found that online social media use is mostly influenced by national and cultural factors (Smith, 2011). For instance, this survey found that Asia is currently the main locale regarding information publishing and sharing on the web.

China, alongside other countries such as Russia, has been an advocate of “internet sovereignty,” which is basically one way to control information. China has developed quite complex cyber skills, as a result, it has advanced the interests of its biggest online organizations abroad, referred to simply as “Internet Power.” However, this approach has proven to undermine trust in the global internet and limits the free progression of information around the world.

Instead of the elimination of social media, restrictions on international websites and social platforms have brought about a prospering local, state-affirmed environment in which Chinese-owned inventions flourish. The internet has enabled Chinese citizens to have access to information in ways that were not considered possible a couple of years back. Social platforms like Twitter, YouTube and Facebook are restricted to access in China, however Chinese social media platforms are swiftly on the rise. For instance, Sina Weibo can be likened to be the Chinese Twitter, being the country’s most common and popular microblogging site with over 400 million active users in comparison with Twitter itself with 50 million less users. By certain measures, social media use in China is generally exceptional. A Boston Consulting Group study found that internet users in China hit an average of 2.7 hours online each day. That is extensively more than other developing countries and more comparable to usage patterns in the US and Japan.

Various elements help drive Chinese, more than different populaces, to participate on social media. Some of the elements are inclusive of the rural-to-urban migration that led to the separation of families, and the distrust of information provided by government-controlled media.

In 2008, a survey by MTV Music Matters found that youngsters across Asia made a comparative number of friends online and offline. Just in China, be that as it may, did youngsters have a greater number of friends online than offline. In China, more than in numerous nations, social media has gotten to be profoundly incorporated into people’s lives (Wang et al., 2019).

The variations between the Chinese social platforms and the international counterparts varies significantly. The variations are not entirely a result of censorship. Just like anywhere else in the world, local variations of social media are driven by language, economics development levels, culture and the fundamental digital environment. Significant contrasts can exist even in nations at comparative levels of economic development. Regardless of government restrictions, online users in South Korea and Japan, for instance, prefer locally created social media platforms like Cyworld and GREE, respectively, as opposed to globally known platforms.

Facebook holds influence as the default social platform in various nations. In China, there is a wide variety of choices to pick from as there are a couple of social networks attracting different audiences, going from urban youth to university students and even the elders. Below are examples of some of the prominent social networking sites in China:

 Qzone – this is one of the largest social platforms in China. Users of this platform ranges from teens through age 25. Users share personal diaries in a blog-like manner.

 Douban – this is a specialized social platform mainly attracting art students and individuals enthusiastic about cinema, culture, music and books. This allows users to be connected through their mutual interests.

 RenRen – this platform can be likened to Facebook. It provides users with interactive features like video uploads and activity updates.

As China’s population moves online, consumer behavior shifts. Oddly, many companies have failed to acknowledge the shifts in their marketing strategies. Social media has grown to become the shared commons where Chinese consumers offer opinions, ask for advice, and discuss brands. Ignoring the Internet could be considered a lost opportunity in the past, but in China today, ignoring social media is a business risk.

 Social media has developed to turn into a mutual center where Chinese consumers provide assessments, request for assistance, and talk about brands. Disregarding social media could be viewed as a lost open door in the past, however in modern day China, overlooking social media has become a business risk.

 References List

Smith, T. (2011). Global state of social media in 2011. [online] Global web index. Available at: http://globalwebindex.net/thinking [Accessed 22 Nov. 2020].

 Singh, N., Lehnert, K. and Bostick, K. (2012). Global Social Media Usage: Insights Into Reaching Consumers Worldwide. Thunderbird International Business Review, 54(5), pp.683–700.

 CNNIC. (2020). Statistical survey report on the Internet development in China. [online] CNNIC. Available at: www.cnnic.net.cn/uploadfiles /pdf/2009/3/23/153540.pdf [Accessed 22 Nov. 2020].

 www.goglobalconsultinggroup.com. (n.d.). Social Media in China: The Same, but Different | Go Global Consulting Group. [online] Available at: http://www.goglobalconsultinggroup.com/blog/social-media-in-china-the-same-but-different/ [Accessed 20 Jul. 2020].

 Wang, W., Qian, G., Wang, X., Lei, L., Hu, Q., Chen, J. and Jiang, S. (2019). Mobile social media use and self-identity among Chinese adolescents: The mediating effect of friendship quality and the moderating role of gender. Current Psychology.

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What is social gaming?

Social gaming is the activity of playing an online game on a social media platform. Simple Facebook games like Lexulous, have proven to create strong social connectivity. The more time we spend glued to our social sites the more probable we are to create feelings referred to as ‘prosocial emotions’, which may include compassion, admiration, love and devotion. Social gaming encourages the development of these prosocial emotions, as a result strengthening community relation.

Social infrastructures implemented in social games (for example, notification systems, chat systems, content sharing systems), make interaction easier and possible between players regardless of varying geographical locations of the players. Social gaming comes with tools that can be utilized for real-world engagement such as sending updates to players about events taking place in the world. An example would be a Facebook game A Better World, in which players are rewarded for the good deeds done in the real world just as well as in the virtual world.

In a Twitch based game called Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, there is a number of ways players can communicate, both verbally, for example by sending messages, and non-verbally (e.g. sending gifts, profile visits etc.). Get this one right, players can effectively communicate during the game and provide feedback at the end of it. This feedback could result in further communication that would offer aid when needed in relation to whatever the feedback was.

Kim (2009) expresses how essential these exchanges are for social media. The communication done through the conversations in social gaming are a fundamental form of social engagement. The same concept could be creatively used as an impact to the socio-emotional ties and as a significant solution that could be modelled into the real world.

Social games are designed in such a way that gives emphasis on co-operative behavior, stimulating communication. In Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, players ought to work together for a team win. The multiplayer gaming option got introduced not so long ago, what a brilliant development it is. In as much as advocating for this new development is appraised, conflict can also be valuable as a learning element in social gaming, hence, the lack of this competitive conflict could be perceived as a limitation of social gaming.

Most social games are free to play, yet social platforms like Twitch and Facebook generate decent profits. These profits are made through micro-transactions mainly involving the player as well as revenue from third-party ads. Taking into consideration the possibility of social game developers not aiming for profits, social gaming provides opportunities that may be used to aid real-world initiatives.

Shay Thompson, co-host of Gaming for Good, expresses how gaming has such an impact on people’s lives that it can do so much good for charity. Child’s Play has raised over £35m currently supporting an excess of 180 children’s hospitals in the world. It also provides funding to the staff offering help in form of therapeutic initiative such as the provision of VR headsets to children undergoing chemotherapy.

In conclusion, although most social games are carefully developed, they are not without any problems. Social gaming can be perceived as having parallel aims such as commercial gain instead of activism, social fun instead of social engagement. If the intention of social gaming is to be open to a conversation about pressing issues such as poverty, genocide and terrorism, initiating real change in the social interaction within the context of gaming would be a first step towards making change in the real world.

References List

Whitson, J.R. and Dormann, C. (2011). Social gaming for change: Facebook unleashed. First Monday, 16(10).

McGonigal, J. (2011). Reality is broken: Why games make us better and how they can change the world.

Kahne, J. and Macgill, A. (n.d.). Teens, Video Games, and Civics. [online] Available at: https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED525058.pdf [Accessed 15 Apr. 2019].

Stenros, J., Paavilainen, J. and Mayra, F. (2011). Social interaction in games. International Journal of Arts and Technology, 4(3), p.342.

Ducheneaut, N. and Moore, R.J. (2004). The social side of gaming. Proceedings of the 2004 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work  - CSCW ’04.

Kim, A.J. (2009). Putting the fun in functional: Applying game mechanics to functional software. Google TechTalks .[online] Available at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ihUt-163gZI [Accessed 10 Nov. 2020].

What is fandom?

Fandom is a subculture comprised of fans uniquely identified by a shared common interest. Fan interest can be simply defined focusing on an individual celebrity, or extensively relating to entire genres, fashion, or hobbies.

Digital revolution has had significant effects on fandom. It has established mutual relationships between fans and prestigious corporations, giving rise to fresh forms of cultural production. Cultural production can be perceived as a social process that creates and circulates various cultural forms, values, practices and shared perceptions.

Different people have varying views on how digital technologies are affecting our societies. Some fans make the best out of the affordances provided by digital technologies, at the same time others wail over the digitally powered abuse of corporate power into most sectors of fandom.

It should be noted that there are certain consequences not only directed to fandom but as well as all other fields of digital production and consumption when fans and acafans (an acafan is an academic who identifies themselves as part of a fandom) raise their concerns over certain trends, governments or entity operations. Below are some examples of how fandoms are making change in the world:

A.R.M.Y

K-Pop fans emerged to be a powerful force amidst the US protests in support of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. Fans of the popular BTS, South Korea’s popular music group, raised funds in support of BLM as well as assembling an activism through flooding BLM hashtags on social media. This has also led to a discussion among K-pop fans on the complicated relationships related to race.

Malaysian K-pop fans have also given more meaning to the word ‘fandom’. A donation in total of RM20,000 was raised after a social media call alerting the ongoing Sabahan Covid-19 spike (Looi, 2010).

Athletes have also seen to stimulate fandom activism. Let’s take for example, the British footballer, Marcus Rashford, who successfully pursued an initiative to end child poverty. This initiative sparked a wide range of support in Britain with over a million people signing the petition which in turn resulted in the British government allocating £400 million to the initiative.

Fandoms have proved to be capable of offering assistance in any way possible. Entities like Extra Life and Games Done Quick have made the best out of its growing community of online gamers. Gamers collect donations with many aiming to complete a full day of marathon playtime.

On the other hand, being a fan is consistently described as unnecessary and verging on deranged behavior. Some think about being a fan as a psychological symptom of an assumed social dysfunction. Taking into consideration the modern-day media addicted age, celebrities’ function as role models for fans who engage in virtual relations with them. Some proceed to design their lives after these celebrity figures.

The other more negative side of fandoms is cyber vigilantism. This is when online users get to policing what they may see to be degenerate social conduct. How about we take for instance when fans uncover a user’s very own personal information so as to harass users for questionable activities.

In conclusion, it is additionally essential to analyze how fans interact in traditional communities, not zeroing in just on digital fandom. While online information can uncover fan cultures as they are lived and gives adequate circumstances in which to observe fans’ identity markers and lingua franca, the offline space can likewise be utilized notwithstanding the online findings in a blended strategic approach.

References List

Pearson, R. (2010). Fandom in the Digital Era. Popular Communication, 8(1), pp.84–95.

Booth, P. (2010). Digital fandom : new media studies. New York: Peter Lang.

Looi, S. (2020). Covid-19: Malaysian fans of K-pop superstars BTS raise funds to help Sabahans hit by pandemic | Malay Mail. [online] www.malaymail.com. Available at: https://www.malaymail.com/news/showbiz/2020/11/03/covid-19-malaysian-fans-of-k-pop-superstars-bts-raise-funds-to-help-sabahan/1918850 [Accessed 10 Nov. 2020].

What is crowdsourcing?

Crowdsourcing is the practice of obtaining needed services, ideas or content by soliciting contributions from a large group of people, especially from the online community rather than from traditional employees or suppliers. The term crowdsourcing was coined by journalist Jeff Howe in the issue of Wired (Bannerman, 2012).

Crowdsourcing is optimistically depicted as a way of putting to use the creativity of the public for free, or for a moderate charge. ‘Turkers’, a term for online workers who use the sites, apparently makes small amounts of money by executing online tasks.

For example, a website named Mechanical Turk operated by Amazon, grants individuals or organizations to post micro-tasks, such as “find the email address for a company” (payment: $0.01/each address), “vote for the best translation” (payment: $0.05/each link), or “rate adult-oriented videos for quality and relevance” (payment: $0.15/each rating) (Amazon, 2010).

Other crowdsourcing platforms include:

Innocentive

Focus on crowdsourcing research and development for pharmaceutical and biomedical companies,

99designs

The world's biggest graphics design marketplace, associates customers requiring custom design work, for example, websites and logos to a thriving network of talented designers who present a new custom design to the site each 7-10 seconds.

Social media and crowdsourcing

Social media has played a significant role throughout the years in catastrophic natural disaster as an information propagator that can be utilized for disaster relief. After the devastating and disastrous Haiti earthquake on 12 January 2010, individuals published numerous photographs and texts about their own encounters during the earthquake via Twitter, Flickr, Facebook, blogs and videos were posted on YouTube. In only 48 hours, the Red Cross received US$8 million in donations legitimately from texts, which represents one advantage of the incredible propagation ability of social media sites.

Survivors likewise utilize social media to stay in contact with the world after a disaster. The jammed cellular network in Japan brought about by the tsunami and earthquake made it difficult for people to communicate with one another. In response, they used Twitter, Facebook, Skype, and local Japanese social networks to communicate and keep in touch with their loved ones (Bannerman, 2012).

Although social media can positively impact disaster relief efforts, it does not give an innate coordination ability to effectively plan and share information, resources, and plans among different relief organizations. All things considered, crowdsourcing applications dependent on social media applications, for example, Twitter and Ushahidi offer a ground-breaking ability for gathering information from disaster scenes and picturing data for relief decision-making.

Research has shown that it is possible to leverage social media to generate community crisis maps and introduce an interagency map to allow organizations to share information as well as collaborate, plan, and execute shared missions. The interagency map is intended to allow organizations to share data in the event that they operate on the same platform or utilize comparative data-representation formats (Bannerman, 2012).

What are the advantages of crowdsourcing for disaster relief?

Compared to traditional relief methods, leveraging crowdsourcing for disaster relief has three advantages.

First, crowdsourced data including user requests and status reports are collected almost immediately after a disaster using social media. Ushahidi-Haiti was set up two hours after the 12 January earthquake by volunteers from Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts (Heinzelman and Waters, 2003).  Soon after, organizations were able to borrow a short message service (SMS) short code phone number (Mission 4636) to send free SMS texts (Munro, 2012). News of this free emergency number was spread through local and national radio stations.

As of 25 January, the Haiti crisis map had more than 2,500 incident reports, with more reports being added every day. The large amount of nearly real-time reports allows relief organizations to identify and respond to urgent cases in time.

Second, crowdsourcing tools can collect data from emails, forms, tweets, and other unstructured methods and then do rudimentary analysis and summaries, such as by creating tag clouds, trends, and other filters. These can help partition the data into bins (such as most-frequently requested resources) and requests into predetermined, most-urgent categories (such as medical help, food, shelter, or people trapped). Relief agencies can then concentrate on the issues and events that are most important to the relief effort.

Third, providers can include geo-tag information for messages sent from some platforms (such as Twitter) and devices (including handheld smart phones). Such crowdsourced data can help relief organizations accurately locate specific requests for help. Furthermore, visualizing this type of data on a crisis map offers a common disaster view and helps organizations intuitively ascertain the current status.

What are the shortfalls of crowdsourcing for disaster relief?

Despite the fact that crowdsourcing applications can give precise and convenient information about a crisis, current crowdsourcing applications actaully miss the mark in supporting disaster relief efforts (Gao et al., 2011).

Above all, most applications do give a common mechanism explicitly designed for cooperation and coordination between different relief organizations. For instance, microblogs and crisis maps don’t give a component for distributing response resources, so various organizations may react to an individual request simultaneously.

A subsequent inadequacy is that data from crowdsourcing applications, while helpful, do not generally give all the correct information required for disaster relief efforts. The accuracy of the report’s geo-tag and content is not guaranteed, in spite of the fact that relief workers enormously need the ability to naturally and precisely locate crowdsourced data on the crisis map. That is, a geo-located tweet does not really allude to the geo-location point. Somebody may message the emergency guide's telephone number to report something they saw earlier, potentially messaging from a shelter about a bridge that collapsed 10 miles not far off.

Furthermore, there are regularly duplicate reports, and information essential for relief coordination isn't promptly accessible or effectively available, for example, arrangements of relief resources or correspondence systems and relief organization contact information.

Lastly, current crowdsourcing applications do not have adequate security features for relief organizations and relief operations. For example, crowdsourcing applications that are publicly available for reporting are also publicly available for viewing. Although it is important to provide information to the public, this can create conflicts when decisions must be made about where and when relief resources are needed.  

In conclusion, crowdsourcing supporting applications don't have sufficient security features for relief organizations and relief operations. For instance, crowdsourcing applications that are openly accessible for revealing are additionally freely accessible for viewing. In spite of the fact that it is essential to give information to people in general, this can stimulate conflict when decisions must be made about where and when relief resources are required.

What is crowdfunding?

Out of crowdsourcing has developed a new phenomenon: crowdfunding. Crowdfunding is the act of funding a project or venture by collecting modest amounts of money from a large number of individuals, ordinarily by means of the Internet.

Crowdfunding is related to crowdsourcing in that both draw on the power of intensity of groups of people and networks. Notwithstanding, crowdfunding is additionally very unique. It works through an open call for funding for specific projects. Funding is requested online, typically in moderately modest quantities, from individual donors or investors, nd goes towards specific projects: personal loans for small businesses, the production of design t-shirts, production of movies or music, or covering medical expenses for the less privileged.

There are four basic models of crowdfunding:

1. Donation-based - funders donate to a project without any expected compensation. An example of a donation-based crowdfunding platform would be:

GoFundMe

GoFundMe is a free crowdfunding platform tailored to fundamentally support people and causes. Since GoFundMe is fit to individual causes— anybody can make a campaign—sponsors on here tend to only support campaigns that originate from inside their own community and personal networks.

GoFundMe isn’t intended for business crowdfunding campaigns, unlike the other platforms. However, if you’re an entrepreneur who has run into difficult times, or you need to raise money to overcome a personal challenge, you can have a go at leveraging this platform for support from your personal network.

Governments, political parties, and the public sector have also experimented with crowdfunding. Barack Obama relied on small donations solicited online during his presidential campaign in 2008. Many government parties fundraise online, as do a wide variety of other initiatives and projects (Pricco, 2014).

2. Reward-based - offers non-financial rewards to funders, such as t-shirts or the opportunity to see a band backstage. An example of a reward-based crowdfunding platform would be:

Kickstarter

This platform is designed around recurrent donations that permits content creators to monetize their videos, blog articles, music and even software developments. On the off chance that people like the project, they can pledge money to get it going. If the project succeeds with regards to arriving at its funding goal, all sponsors' credit cards are charged when time expires.

3. Lending-based - funders expect repayment of the funding they contribute to a project. An example of a lending-based crowdfunding platform would be:

Kiva

Provides the ability to lend money via the Internet to low-income entrepreneurs and students. Kiva's mission is "to expand financial access to help underserved communities thrive."

4. Equity-based -  funders receive equity, revenue, or a share of the profits in a project. An example of an equity-based crowdfunding platform would be:

StartEngine

StartEngine is one of the world’s biggest equity crowdfunding sites. StartEngine pulls funds from an investor's account once the company has exceeded their minimum funding goal, and the escrow account has been opened (StartEngine, n.d.).

Crowdfunding platforms encourage the assembly of ideas, the interconnection of funders with creators, the uniting of ideas and resources, and new entity prospects.

In conclusion, a few key inquiries should be posed as crowdfunding moves past its outset: How can crowdfunding work in the interests of the public, creating new opportunities, contributing to public spheres, and guaranteeing a reasonable appropriation of benefits? Should the principle that publicly-funded research be made openly available apply to crowdfunded projects?

On top of the potential advantages crowdfunding brings to individual corporations, it likewise can possibly improve the efficiency of the development sector as a whole. Numerous development organizations are dependent on traditional support mechanisms with pre-set up measures for performance defined by external donors and tested by anonymous authorities. Crowdfunding, by contrast, empowers joint development of projects and dialogue. During the selection of projects, its only reference are the organization's values and quality measures, which need to be communicated to potential supporters. Projects that are attractive and significant receive adequate sufficient support - not simply those that meet the current (political) support priorities.

References list

Bannerman, S. (2012). Crowdfunding Culture. Web. Wi: Journal of Mobile Culture, [online] 06(04), p.4. Available at: http://wi.mobilities.ca/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/sbannermanwi_2012_06_04.pdf [Accessed 13 Oct. 2019].

Amazon. (2010). All Hits. [online] Available at: https://www.mturk.com/mturk/findhits?match=false [Accessed 26 Oct. 2020].

Zeng, D., Gao, H., Barbier, G. and Goolsby, R. (2010). Ieee InTeLLIGenT SySTemS Harnessing the Crowdsourcing Power of Social Media for Disaster Relief. [online] Available at: https://apps.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a581803.pdf.

Heinzelman, J. and Waters, C. (2003). About the RepoRt Crowdsourcing Crisis Information in Disaster- Affected Haiti Summary. [online] Available at: https://mirror.explodie.org/Crowdsourcing%20Crisis%20Information%20in%20Disaster-Affected%20Haiti.pdf [Accessed 27 Oct. 2020].

Muralidharan, S., Rasmussen, L., Patterson, D. and Shin, J.-H. (2011). Hope for Haiti: An analysis of Facebook and Twitter usage during the earthquake relief efforts. Public Relations Review, 37(2), pp.175–177.

MP, H. (2011). Japan Tsunami & Earthquake – Use of Twitter, Facebook, Skype & other Social Networks. [online] Bubblecube. Available at: http://bubblecube.wordpress.com/2011/03/12/japan-tsunami-earthquake [Accessed 27 Oct. 2020].

Munro, R. (2012). Crowdsourcing and the crisis-affected community. Information Retrieval, 16(2), pp.210–266.

Gao, H., Barbier, G. and Goolsby, R. (2011). Harnessing the Crowdsourcing Power of Social Media for Disaster Relief. IEEE Intelligent Systems, 26(3), pp.10–14.

Flannery, M. (2007). Kiva and the Birth of Person-to-Person Microfinance. Innovations: Technology, Governance, Globalization, 2(1–2), pp.31–56.

Pricco, D. (2014). Political Crowdfunding - how politicians are learning to harness the crowd. [online] CrowdExpert.com. Available at: http://crowdexpert.com/articles/crowdfunding-in-politics/ [Accessed 27 Oct. 2020].

CROWDFUNDING INDUSTRY REPORT Market Trends, Composition and Crowdfunding Platforms THE INDUSTRY WEBSITE TM. (2012). [online] Available at: http://www.crowdfunding.nl/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/92834651-Massolution-abridged-Crowd-Funding-Industry-Report.pdf [Accessed 27 Oct. 2020].

Social media has gone from solidarity to quality in growing the amount of users. Between 2019 and 2020, social media showed an increase of over 200 million users. By 2025, a projection entails an increase to almost 4.41 billion users from the current 2020 high, 3.6 billion (Statista, n.d.). Subsequently, public health campaigns increasingly vie for people’s attention and try to influence their behavior through social media channels, however, this requires persistently adapting to trends.

What role can social media play in public health?

Social media facilitates health care professionals with tools to share information, to discuss health care policy and practice issues, to advance health behaviors, to draw in with people in general, and to educate and interact with patients, guardians, and colleagues.

Various trends that have impacted public health social media campaigns include:

* Facebook advertising, which has empowered micro-targeting ability

* the predominance of cell phones - with people seemingly dependent on scrolling over their phones frequently and where photos and videos are the ‘narcotic of decision’

* Instagram and Snapchat have unquestionably become the social media of preference for young people

* Twitter - public health anlaysts use Twitter to both communicate with study participants and to mine the platform for any data.

There has been exponential enthusiasm for, and interest in, the use of social media for public health communications, however, there is little comprehension of the connection between online engagement and behavior change. 

Few research studies have analyzed the achievement of social media in impacting health promoting behaviors. What is yet to be seen is the means by which best to reach out to social media users and what kind of messages slice through the online clutter.

Solid proof indicates that public health social marketing campaigns mediated through mainstream media can have an immediate and positive effect on behavior. Nonetheless, a great advantage presented by social media is that exploring communication techniques and messages could be significantly less resource intensive and conceivably less risky than investing money in a costly new television campaign  (Freeman et al., 2015).

Taking in the changes in the dynamic social media scene, here are some of the absolute best public health campaigns across the globe:

1. Movember

The Movember foundation focuses on men’s health issues. They focus on sparing men’s lives by tackling prostate cancer, testicular cancer, mental health, and suicide prevention.

It’s annual social media campaign, #Movember, proposed an enticing challenge to grow out a mustache for the month of November to raise awareness and funds. Discussions about men’s health issues are begun naturally: “For what reason are you growing out your mustache?”.

These conversations at that point then spread through social channels that develop foothold and engagement. They tell the brand story and spread awareness in a credible authentic manner. The Movember Foundation gets a handle on the impact that social listening has on their community.

2. World Heart Day

With the objective of decreasing cardiovascular coronary disease cases and strokes by 2025, the World Heart Foundation launched several social media campaigns on different social media platforms. For instance, ‘Healthy Heart Selfies’ where people post exercise and health related photos with the #PowerYourLife and #WorldHeartDay hashtags.

3. Heads Up | Heads Together

This is a mental health initiative spearheaded by The Royal Foundation of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, which combines a campaign to tackle stigma and change the conversation on mental health with fundraising for a series of innovative new mental health services.

4.  Tips from Former Smokers

This CDC campaign aims to get people to stop smoking. It uses impactful images, and often frightening images in its print ads. These messages are from real former smokers. In the video presented above, Terrie described what it is like to live every day with stoma. The campaign featuring Terri was so successful, the CDC expanded on her message by holding a live Facebook chat where smokers shared their stories. Calls to tobacco quit lines doubled during the first two weeks of the campaign.

5. Organ Donation Wales

ODW encourages people to talk more about the importance of organ donation. They also have made the brave decision to hijack people’s coffee orders in a very clever way of highlighting the problem caused by families overriding the wishes of their loved ones.

What’s the intimate connection between social media and everyday life through health, wellbeing and illness?

We might as well begin by guiding the spotlight to the adolescent. Adolescence would presumably be a superior guide to use in relation to how much of a significant period it is, taking into consideration of psychological, biological and social changes that occur during this period for young people. Adolescence comes with adjustment to emergent needs, growing new abilities, responsibilities and personal connections (Christie and Viner, 2005). This is a completely different experience of life and one arguably more challenging in contemporary environments as adolescents manage different personal and educational pressures, not the same as those from previous generations.

Social media is a generally new medium through which adolescents can manage their mental wellness. For sure young people regularly turn to sites such as Facebook and Twitter to escape from other pressures undermining their psychological wellbeing. Young people living in many countries have seen social media become contributive to their education, culture and social life. A recent study found that 57% of 3 US teens had started relationships online, with half of respondents having friended somebody on Facebook to let them know that they were interested romantically. Evidently, social media are coming to play an increasingly significant part in the social and emotional development of youths  (OíKeefe & Clarke-Pearson, 2011).

Although social media may be encouraging new forms of communication and social connection, at first there were fears about the amount of time youngsters were spending on the web. Internet use was apparently connected to a decrease in face-to-face contact, increased social isolation, stress, depression and sleep deprivation. It was also claimed to encourage hostile and unsafe behavior, ostensibly inconvenient to mental health. Despite the fact that there is research that contradicts this “internet anomaly” by providing evidence that such negative symptoms vanish once internet novices became more experienced users of ICTs.  Besides, the impacts of using the internet upon those with conditions, for example, depression was argued to be dependent upon the motivation behind its use and the prior social resources of individual users (O’Reilly et al., 2018).

All things considered, policymakers have kept on communicating worries in relation to the degree of risk that adolescents are exposed to on social media. Explicit dangers incorporate, being exposed to what in particular is contended to be wrong substance for their age group, for example, online pornography; inappropriate distribution as explicitly provocative or adversarial remarks and security violations (OíKeefe and Clarke-Pearson, 2011). 

Reference List

Statista. (n.d.). Number of social media users worldwide. [online] Available at: https://www.statista.com/statistics/278414/number-of-worldwide-social-network-users/#:~:text=In%202020%2C%20an%20estimated%203.6.

Giustini, D.M., Ali, S.M., Fraser, M. and Boulos, M.N.K. (2018). Effective uses of social media in public health and medicine: a systematic review of systematic reviews. Online Journal of Public Health Informatics, 10(2). 

Sinnenberg, L., Buttenheim, A.M., Padrez, K., Mancheno, C., Ungar, L. and Merchant, R.M. (2017). Twitter as a Tool for Health Research: A Systematic Review. American Journal of Public Health, 107(1), pp.e1–e8.

Freeman, B., Potente, S., Rock, V. and McIver, J. (2015). Social media campaigns that make a difference: what can public health learn from the corporate sector and other social change marketers? Public Health Research & Practice.

Christie, D. and Viner, R. (2005). Adolescent development. BMJ : British Medical Journal, [online] 330(7486), pp.301–304. Available at: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC548185/.

O’Reilly, M., Dogra, N., Whiteman, N., Hughes, J., Eruyar, S. and Reilly, P. (2018). Is social media bad for mental health and wellbeing? Exploring the perspectives of adolescents. Clinical Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 23(4), pp.601–613.

The use of cellphones by activists has been quite successful inspiring hope. Taking into consideration, the tools and services used to assemble a movement i.e consumer-grade electronics, decent data plan, it takes quite an effort to wield successful results that could potentially toss out dictators or bring any urban center to a standstill.

Political and women's rights activists in Nigeria are playing quite an important role by bringing awareness to the abductions of girls. Aisha Yesufu's constant emphasis on #BringBackOurGirls gathered quite a following including prominent figures and celebrities. A glimpse of the movement can be found below.

The interconnection of social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter facilitates formation of like-minded online communities where the distribution of information happens in a much lesser time and less energy-consuming in comparison to the more traditional methods of standing on a street or going door-to-door.

#hangtherapists has been trending in Bangladesh for a while. This online movement sparked a protest consisting of hundreds of people to the streets demanding justice after a series of rapes and sexual assaults that have spurred to seek capital punishment for offenders.

I consider digital activism to be non-violent. However, frequent news updates about cyberterrorists, cybercrime and hackers makes digital activism seem like a dark cave whereas close comparative analysis of campaign strategies, successes, and failures reveals that persuasion features more highly than violence (Edwards, Howard and Joyce, 2013).

What makes a digital activism campaign successful?

First of all, it can be right to state that the selection of a particular tool can facilitate specific campaign outcomes.

A successful digital activism campaign makes use of social media and online activity to rally support and then combine this with "leg work" on the ground, not just talking the talk, but also walking the walk (RESET.to, 2011).

Social media continues to play a vital role in documenting the protests, publishing demonstrations of support, promoting donation and allyship opportunities and generally spreading information that the general public may otherwise have been unaware of.

Reference List

Edwards, F., Howard, P.N. and Joyce, M. (2013). Digital Activism and Non‐Violent Conflict. [online] papers.ssrn.com. Available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2595115 [Accessed 11 Oct. 2020].

RESET.to. (2011). Digital and Online Activism | Responsibility. [online] Available at: https://en.reset.org/knowledge/digital-and-online-activism [Accessed 8 Mar. 2019].

First of all, we could start by discussing how everyday social media use by ordinary people and by political or social activists, is enabling users in disparate locations to be connected.

These established connections could be emotional or affective ones, seen as a mutual feeling of empathy or distress that assists with impelling digital mobilization and to create a civil society. The obscuring of the boundaries by social media platforms between emotion and rationality, private life and public life, is a significant feature of the acknowledgement of a civil society.

As anyone might expect, not every person is similarly optimistic about social media-driven contemporary support and mobilization or the even networking influences for new forms of politics. Some have reliably pointed out that it is those individuals who have digital skills and literacy who stand to gain the most in using the internet for campaigning or activism. Online political activities are infrequently illustrative of the various groups comprising society. This is a significant test to the principle of equality, fundamental to all democracy models (Breindl, 2013).

An argument by Dumitrica comes to mind, highlighting that the networked use of social media does not guarantee political change. The affordances of new social media platforms such as Twitter, may make it easier to engage in politics, but should not be understood as independently leading to equality or democracy, whatever the case may be. The actions of people collectively, the possibilities of inclusion and questions of where political power is based, all still matter (Dumitrica and Bakardjieva, 2017).

Take for example, the twitter movement hashtagged #MarchForOurLives, this is a well connected movement, however, requires people's action and the drive to fulfill the physical execution of the movement. This connected society has given rise to much needed awareness leading to murder investigations, for example, the disturbing murder of Breonna Taylor. The current investigation into this murder resulted to no charges: https://twitter.com/AMarch4OurLives/status/1308889184036433929. Indeed, networked use of social media does not guarantee intended social or political results. However, a true sign of misfunctionality of policing in America.

Social media use is changing political participation in the traditional sense - from citizens using it to engage their governments and demanding better societies, to campaign leaders using it to craft their autobiography as well as organizational narratives.

It is notably visible how some of these political campaigns are comprised of strategies aimed at 'targets' that are mostly shifting beyond government to include non-governmental entities or corporations.

Reference List

Breindl, Y. and Briatte, F. (2013). Digital Protest Skills and Online Activism Against Copyright Reform in France and the European Union. Policy & Internet, 5(1), pp.27–55.

Dumitrica, D. and Bakardjieva, M. (2017). The personalization of engagement: the symbolic construction of social media and grassroots mobilization in Canadian newspapers. Media, Culture & Society, 40(6), pp.817–837.

Amidst all the indecisiveness, there might be a way to start off this debate by stating the word hybrid. Perhaps, Marko Muellner sums it up best when he described Tumblr as a microblogging service and social network that allows users to create custom blogs and post multimedia and text as blog posts, which users can comment on, like or rep-post; users can also follow other blogs and the main user interface, the dashboard, is a feed of posts making it similar to other social networks.

A social network site enables constant communication and connection, while encouraging increasingly public levels of self-disclosure or exposure. Fascinating.

In these contexts, networks are developed and maintained through self-expression, communicating and sharing.

Tumblr and any other social networking site (i.e. Twitter) operate in similar ways. Both platforms project identities that affiliate with particular social groups on the basis of the types of content produced and shared.

As of January 2020, tumblr was rated 13th with a user percentage of 20% between users of age 16 to 64. That explains the increasing amount of hilarious content on my feed.

Blog threads gave rise to speech communities sharing similar ideas, uses and norms of language. The conversations seem endless as some are re-blogged, shared and frequently commented. This might even begin to feel like Twitter for a minute.

Walker Rettberg highlights how blurry the difference between a medium and a genre has become because of the internet. He argues that, if we see blogs not as a genre but as a medium, that need not be a problem. It’s easy enough to say that television is a medium and that talk shows, soap operas and sitcoms are genres (Rettberb, 2013).

I believe mommyblog is the perfect use of blogging as a medium. Rettberg would be proud. Mommy blog dishes out advice and empathy on raising children. How marvelous. According to the New York Times, mommy blogs are so popular, they are becoming a cultural force to be reckoned with.

Tumblr is one of many popular tools for digital librarians to embrace. In August 2020, a study on the affordances for social media by high school students finds that Tumblr is the third most popular platform among survey respondents. This study also provides an excellent literature review of relevant articles on social media’s use in educational settings beyond libraries. 

While not directly addressing Tumblr, articles exploring the use of social media, specifically microblogging and libraries also contribute to the scholarship. However, due to its “newness,” Tumblr is not included in the majority of these. The studies and observations surrounding blogs and other microblogging tools such as Twitter in libraries can be applied to the study and practice of using Tumblr in libraries. 

Taurili et al. (2013) explore the use of social media and microblogging in providing a reader’s advisory service. Kim et al. (2014) find in their study on undergraduates’ use of social media as information sources that blogs and microblogs were rarely used for gaining information. They discover a higher rate of information seeking taking place on social networking sites, user reviews on sites and video sharing sites.

Reference List

Rourke, S 2020, What is Social Networking? - Definition & Information, viewed 27 September, 2020, <https://www.marketingterms.com/dictionary/social_networking/>.

Rouse, M 2016, What is social networking? - Definition from WhatIs.com, viewed 27 September, 2020, <https://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/social-networking>.

Barnes, I. (2014) “Twitter in Special Libraries: A distributed social media strategy”, Public Services Quarterly, Vol.10, pp. 62-65.

Kim, K.-S., Sin, S.-C. J., & Yoo-Lee, E. (2013), “Undergraduates’ use of social media as information sources”, College & Research Libraries, crl13–455.