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Home , Bulletin board system, Friends Reunited, Timeline of social media

and Digital Technology

Part 1 - Social Media & Social Part 2 - How “Big Data” will Networking change your life • Learn the history of social • What is “Big Data” and who media and look at some of is collecting it? How will it the more familiar names be used for marketing? We such as and will look at advances in and how they are digital technology hardware used. We will discuss the and what might lie ahead. good, the bad and the ugly We will also explore how or social media and digital technology is used in consider some points to everyday life. ponder. Social Media and Digital Technology

Part 3 - Social Media and Part 4 - Learning for life Journalism through MOOCs • From courtrooms to • MOOCs (“massively open communities to staffing, online classes” – Take a tour social media are changing of freely available online the way we get news – and courses and tutorials. challenging traditional Discuss implications of notions of what “news” is. accessibility as well as the cost and quality of higher education. We will explore some online education possibilities. Social Media and Digital Technology

Part 5 - New media, privacy & Part 6 - Harnessing the the First Amendment wisdom of crowds online • New media make new law – • Crowds can be stupid and or at least, pose new brutal, but under the right questions for old law. How circumstances, crowd has the concept of “privacy” collaboration can lead to changed? How do we do stunningly good results. For jury selection? What kinds example, we will talk about of information do we trust – Wikipedia, discuss its flaws or do not trust? and give you a chance to actually make some changes to the entries. Social Media & Social Networking: what’s it all about?

Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at Vanderbilt – October 4, 2012 DEFINITIONS:

SOCIAL MEDIA SOCIAL NETWORKING • Is a collection of - • Think of it as an online based tools and platforms community of people that enables the sharing of (individuals, groups & information. organizations) with • A common thread running common interests, who use through all definitions of a website and other social media is a blending of technologies to technology and social communicate with each interaction. other and share information, resources, etc. NOTE: there is a grey area between the definitions of social media and social networking, so if you hear one term used instead of the other, don’t sweat it. Most people use them interchangeably. A and Social Networking

• 1971 - The first was delivered (the two were sitting next to each other in Cambridge, MA, and one sent “QWERTYUIOP”, the string of letters on the top line of the keyboard) • 1978 – Two Chicago hobbyists invented the (BBS) to inform friends of meetings and share information through postings. • 1979 – was an early bulletin board that connected Duke and the University of North Carolina • 1985 – The America Online (AOL) service opened. • 1989 – British engineer Tim Berners-Lee began work at CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) on what was to become the . • (NOTE: It was not invented by this man

• In 1993, CERN donated the WWW technology to the world for free. • 1994 – Beverly Hills Internet (BHI) started GeoCities which allowed users to create their own websites modeled after types of urban areas. Yahoo, which opened as a major internet search engine in 1994, owns GeoCities today. It has since shut down. • 1994 – More than 1,500 Web servers were online and people were referring to the Internet as the Information Superhighway.

A Timeline of Social Media and Social Networking (continued)

• 1997 – SixDegrees.com let users create profiles and list friends. • 1997 – AOL Instant Messenger lets users chat in “real time.” • 1998 – opens as a major internet search engine and index. • 1999 – Friends Reunited was founded in Great Britain to locate past school pals and is hailed as the first online to achieve prominence. • 2000 – 70 million computers were connected to the Internet. • 2001 – Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, was started (NOTE: Professor Doug Fisher will spend a lot more time with this topic on November 8th) • 2001 – Apple started selling iPods. • 2002 – , a social networking website, opened to the public in the US and grew to 3 million users in 3 months. • 2002 – AOL had 34 million members. • 2003 – MySpace, another social networking site, was launched as a clone of Friendster. • 2003 – LinkedIn was started as a business-oriented social networking site for professionals. A Timeline of Social Media and Social Networking (continued)

• 2003 – There were more than 3 billion Web pages. • 2004 – Facebook was started at Harvard. It was referred to at the time as a college version of Friendster. • 2005 – Rupert Murdoch’s purchased MySpace for $580 million. (It was subsequently sold to singer Justin Timberlake and friends for $35 million in 2011.) • 2005 – YouTube began storing and retrieving videos. • 2005 – Facebook launched a version for high school students. • 2005 – There were more than 8 billion Web pages. • 2006 – MySpace was the most popular social networking site in the US; Facebook would take away that lead in 2008. • 2006 – Twitter was launched as a social networking and site, enabling members to send and receive 140-character messages called “tweets.” • 2006 – Facebook membership was expanded and opened to anyone over age 13. • 2006 – Google had indexed more than 25 billion Web pages, 400 million queries per day, 1.3 billion images and more than a billion Usenet messages. A Timeline of Social Media and Social Networking (continued)

• 2007 – Apple released the first iPhone . (More about that next week.) • 2008 – Facebook tried unsuccessfully to buy Twitter for $500 million in stock. • 2010 – It was estimated the population of Internet users was 1.97 billion. That was almost 30% of the global population. • 2010 – The Internet had surpassed newspapers as the third primary way for Americans to get news. National and local TV stations were strong, first and second, but the Internet was ahead of national and local newspapers. (NOTE: Gene Policinski will have a lot more to say about this in coming classes.) • 2010 – Apple released the iPad tablet computer. • 2010 - Facebook’s rapid growth moved it above 500 million users while MySpace declined to 57 million users, down from 75 million. • 2011 – Social media had become an integral part of our daily lives with more than 750 million people on Facebook, 65 million tweets sent through Twitter each day, and 2 billion video views every day on YouTube. LinkedIn had 90 million professional users. • 2011 – Public sharing of so much personal information via social media sites raised concern over privacy. • 2012 – It is estimated that Internet users will double by 2015 to a global total of some four billion users, or nearly 60% of Earth’s population.

Who are the major players?

• is a social networking site that was • is a microblogging social media site that founded in 2004 at Harvard by Mark was created in 2006 by Jack Dorsey in San Zuckerberg and several others. It has Francisco. It has about 500 million users revenue of about $1.2 billion. Facebook and will generate $1 billion in ad revenue has approximately a billion active in 2014. The definition was "a short burst accounts as of the end of August. of inconsequential information," and Zuckerberg owns around 28% of the "chirps from birds." No more than 140 company and is worth around $13 billion. characters of information at a time (the Members are invited to be “Friends” or to limit for SMS messages) are sent in “Like” Fan Pages or Groups. It has messages referred to as “tweets.” As of significant media impact, social impact March 2012, about 340 million tweets are and political impact. Its stock has gone posted each day, equaling about 4,000 from a high of 42 to around 21, a 50% tweets sent each second. Members are tumble. Members report a “status” that invited to “Follow” others or be can be almost anything. It may or may not “Followed” by other. Think “Arab Spring” be interesting to any of their “friends.” and other protests.

More Major Players

• was founded in 2009 by Dennis Crowley. • is a video-sharing website and was It is a location-based social networking founded in February 2005 by Chad Hurley site for mobile devices. Users “check in” and Jawed Karim. In November 2006, it at venues using a mobile website, text was bought by Google, Inc. for $1.65 messaging or a device-specific application billion) It is one of those hybrid social by selecting from a list of venues the media and social networking sites application locates nearby. Location is because registered users can comment on based on GPS hardware in the mobile other people’s videos. The argument is device or network location provided by that it is primarily a social media site the application. As of April 2012, the because it focuses on the videos while company reported it had 20 million social networking sites concentrate on registered users. The company was relationships with people. For those old expected to pass 750 million check-ins enough to remember: “Certs is a candy before the end of June, with an average of mint. Certs is a breath mint. Stop, you’re about 3 million check-ins per day. 50 both right! Certs gives you two-two-two percent of users are outside the US. mints in one!”

And for the business person…

• A business-oriented social networking site • A major feature of LinkedIn is its groups, started in 2003 when the five founders enabling anyone to start a group based on invited 300 contacts to become members an association or industry topic. For and wound up with 4,500 by the end of example, there are tens of thousands of the month. By year end, more than 80,000 academic and corporate groups that members were linked in, and six years enable alumni and employees to stay in later there were more than 35 million touch. LinkedIn members request an members in 200 countries. It enables invitation to the group and can receive users to connect with colleagues, look for postings by other members via e-mail. a job or business relationships and get answers to industry questions. LinkedIn users invite people they know and trust to become "linked in" to them, and the business connections of invited users are in turn linked. However, in order to reach connections down the line, requests for introductions have to be made.

Social Media Explained

I need to go to the bathroom

I went to the bathroom

This is where I went to the bathroom

This is me going to the bathroom

I’m good at going to the bathroom And some of the others….

• is a free photo-sharing program and social • is a pinboard-style social photo sharing network that was launched in October website that allows users to create and 2010. The service enables users to take a manage theme-based image collections photo, apply a digital filter to it, and then such as events, interests, hobbies, and share it with other users they more. Users can browse other pinboards are connected to on the network as well for inspiration, 're-pin' images to their as on a variety of other social networksing own collections or 'like' photos. TIME services. InstaGram currently has 100 Magazine listed in its "50 Best million registered users. Facebook Websites of 2011". In January 2012, purchased InstaGram in April 2012 for $1 comScore reported the site had 11.7 billion in cash and stock. (I hope they got million unique U.S. visitors, making it the mostly cash.) fastest site ever to break through the 10 million unique visitor mark. Some have said InstaGram is Twitter for people who can’t read!

And a few more….

and and • Spotify is a Swedish music streaming • is a social news website where the service, with music from a range of major registered users submit content, in the record labels, that lets friends know what form of either a link or a text "self" post. songs you are listening to, in case they’d Other users then vote the submission "up" like to hear it as well. These are social or "down", which is used to rank the post music networks. Spotify is currently and determine its position on the site's coupled with Facebook and has about 15 pages and front page. Storify is a website million users. iHeartRadio now functions that creates and preserves or as a music recommender and a radio timelines using social media such as network that aggregates content from 800 Twitter, photos and videos. It was local Clear Channel radio stations across launched in 2010, and has been open to the US, as well as hundreds of stations the public since April 2011. TIME owned by other companies. iHeartRadio Magazine rated Storify as one of the 50 has more than 10 million users and is best websites of 2011. Storify means “to available online, via mobile devices and form or tell stories.” on select consoles.

Not exactly social media but important…

• Google was created in 1998 by Sergey Brin • Yahoo! was a website created by Jerry Yang and Larry Page in Menlo Park, CA. Revenues and David Filo in 1994 in Santa Clara, CA. It for 2011 were $37 billion and a profit of $9.7 was originally called “David and Jerry’s Guide billion. It is the number one brand name in to the World Wide Web” but was changed to the world today (besides Apple). There were Yahoo, which stands for “Yet Another 119 billion Google searches in June 2012. Hierarchical Officious Oracle.” Yahoo! went Google is the internet’s most visited site and public in 1996 raising $33 million in an initial has become a part of everyday speech. (By public offering. It has acquired many smaller the way, the origin of the name “google” companies. In 2008, offered to comes from a misspelling of the word pay $44 billion for the company but the offer "googol," the number one followed by one was rejected, claiming that it undervalued hundred zeros, which was meant to signify the company. Yahoo has 500 million web the amount of information the search engine visitors a month. Revenue in 2011 was $4.9 was to handle. It is holding around $44 billion billion and profit was $827 million. Yahoo in cash and has 33,000 employees. has the world's largest market share in online display advertising of 17%. Microsoft is a distant second at 11%.

Not exactly social media but important…

• was founded in 2003 by the • Wikipedia was created by Jimmy Wells Swedish entrepreneur Niklas Zennstrom. and Larry Sanger in 2001. The name is The Skype software was developed in derived from the Hawaiian “” meaning Estonia and 44% of its staff live there. It quick and encyclopedia. It is a free, web- has been owned by Microsoft since 2011. based multilingual project supported by Skype had 663 million registered users as the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Its of September 2011. Phone calls are free 23 million articles (over 4 million in to other Skype software users, but English) have been written collaboratively charged when calling mobile and landline by volunteers around the world, and phones. Unlike most other VoiP (Voice almost all of its articles can be edited by over internet Protocol) services, Skype is a anyone with access to the site, which hybrid peer-to-peer system. It makes use opens it to all sorts of misinformation. of background processing on computers There are about 100,000 contributors. The running Skype software. Skype's original Wikimedia Foundation is tax exempt in proposed name (Sky Peer-to-Peer) reflects the US and derives its money from grants this fact. and hundreds of thousands of small donations of $10 or less.

Some YouTube Statistics…

• Over 800 million unique users visit YouTube each month • Over 4 billion hours of video are watched each month on YouTube • 72 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute • 70% of YouTube traffic comes from outside the US • YouTube is localized in 43 countries and across 60 languages • In 2011, YouTube had more than 1 trillion views or around 140 views for every person on Earth • 500 years of YouTube video are watched every day on Facebook, and over 700 YouTube videos are shared on Twitter each minute

Some Twitter Facts

• Over 465 million accounts • 175 million Tweets per day (avg 2,000 Tweets/second) • 1 million accounts added to Twitter every day • Tweets about the recent Colorado theater shooting total more than 10 million. • A Greek athlete was disqualified from the 2012 London Olympics for sending a racist “tweet” before the games even started. • Twitter users sent more than 15,000 tweets per second (54 million per hour) when Spain scored its fourth goal in the Euro 2012 Soccer final.

Some famous “Tweets” Tweet by President Obama after the September 24th Monday Night Football debacle with replacement referees

A tasteless Tweet shortly after the Japanese earthquake and tsunami that cost Gilbert Gottfried his voice-over job as the Aflac duck More interesting “Tweets” A writer for Saturday Night Live, Mike Drucker, had this Tweet in 2011:

And this spark of genius from Conan O’Brien: The Most Famous Tweet so far - 1/15/2009 Some Social Media Activities

• Texting – using a land-line or mobile phone or computer to send a brief message to someone else with a device capable of receiving the text message. SMS stands for “short message system” and MMS stands for “media messaging system” which can contain photos. • IM and – . Originated with networked computers in the 70’s when computer operators would send messages to computer users telling them their printout was ready, etc. In the mid 90s, America Online developed instant messaging into an art form. The term “Instant Messenger”itself is owned by Time Warner and cannot be used in any software not affiliated with America Online. – News programs, like Dateline NBC and several ID Channel shows, now have interactive chatting with reporters and anchors. E! Entertainment News now asks viewers to share thoughts immediately on different topics by tweeting their comments to a particular “hash tag” which is the pound sign follows by a name such as #tomkat for the Tom Cruise/Katie Holmes divorce settlement and #ilikegleeks for comments about the TV show “Glee.” • Shorthand Language – common examples include OMG ( Oh my God), LOL (laughing out loud), ROFL (rolling on floor laughing), POS (parent over shoulder), JK (just kidding) and WTF (which does not stand for “Why the face?”) .

The Good!

• Ultra-fast, concise communication of seemingly important events to a gigantic audience (Twitter). • Letting internet users around the world know of and see and hear a particularly talented person or animal (cat playing piano, dog dancing the meringue, 1500 Filipino prisoners dancing to “Thriller”) that they otherwise would know nothing about. These things may go “viral.” (YouTube) • Sharing pictures, home videos, links to other websites and other information (birthdays, engagements, restaurants, etc.) among friends without having to have pictures printed and mailed, etc. (Facebook)

“Going viral”

• A term used when an internet message or video or photo or joke gets spread to thousands, if not millions, of Internet users within minutes. Examples include Justin Bieber, a teen pop sensation, whose father posted a video of him singing on YouTube and it spread like wildfire. Another is 11 year-old Jackie Evancho, who sings opera and was featured on “America’s Got Talent” a few years ago. One of my favorites is known as a “flash mob.” I won’t tell you what this is about but relax a few minutes and watch this from Ontario, Canada. Christmas Food Court

• There are several versions of the song “Call Me Maybe” by Carlie Rae Jepson, including parodies by some midshipmen at the Naval Academy and the Olympic swimming team. Call Me Maybe

Some Top Viral Videos • As of September 2012, the Top 5 Videos of all time are music videos: – #1 – Justin Bieber’s song, “Baby” 777,240,044 views – #2 – Jennifer Lopez’ “On the Floor” 592,450,651 views – #3 – Eminem’s “Love the Way you Lie” 492,907,293 views – #4 – Shakira’s “Waka Waka” 491,196,696 views – #5 – Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance” 485,167,166 views • The 6th most watched video (484,551,195 views) is not a music video and features two little English boys. It’s called, “Charlie bit my finger… again.”

The Bad! • Terrible videos of people that think they have talent but don’t, that fill up the YouTube airwaves and are gigantic wastes of time(…like the Bieber song). • Texting or “tweeting” while driving a vehicle. Many states have outlawed it but it’s very hard to enforce. Lots of accidents and dented fenders as a result of not paying attention. In one famous case, a Metrolink train engineer in California was texting and collided with another train because he failed to see a red light signal on the tracks and 25 people died. Tennessee is one of the leading states with accidents and deaths involving texting and driving. • Sexting, where youngsters ages 11 to 18, (or dumb oldsters *) send sexually explicit messages or photographs, primarily between mobile phones. (* This practice cost U.S. Rep. Anthony Wiener his job.) • Texting to cheat on exams. While cell phones are supposedly not allowed in exam room, some young adults are actually taking quick pictures of exam pages and/or their answers and sending them to others in the same room. • The average kid spends 7-9 hours a day with electronic media: computer screens, , game boxes, tablets and television.

The Ugly!

• In Sept. 2012, a father posted a picture of his 3 year-old daughter on the website Reddit with a sign around her neck proclaiming she had pottied in the shower instead of in the toilet. She’s 3. Stuff like that happens. That picture will last a lifetime. And, of course, she can’t read, so why does her dad have her “sign” that the picture can be used in her senior yearbook? Discipline? Shaming? Cute? Stupid? You be the judge.

• Another example is the live video captured by the roommate of a Rutgers student (Tyler Clementi) in Sept. 2010 as the student was having sex with a male partner. Three days after dozens on the Rutgers campus saw the video on a link, the student jumped off the George Washington bridge and killed himself. Points to Ponder

• Does the good of instant communication outweigh the bad of poor judgment? • Should parents enforce stricter discipline on how their children use technology? • Is social media making today’s kids more anti- social? • Are we losing the ability to communicate in person or in writing?