Final take home exam Term Paper Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2000 words

Final take home exam - Term Paper Example Hence, the quality of interaction has improved to a great level. This eventful journey of social media development is marked by several milestones. I will be highlighting 5 of the most key moments in the history of social media. In my opinion, the first one is obviously the development of e-mail. E-mail is probably the first form of digital message. The next one is development of Genie, which was an online forum that led the foundation of social media. I believe the third milestone was a major shift in terms of development (Freeman, 2010). It came in the form of world’s first social platform where users actually got the opportunity to get in touch with their loved ones. The website was known to as classmates.com. The emergence of Friendster, improved and modern social media platform is the next big thing to have happened. The craze was such that within the first month of its launch, around 3 million people joined in. The last major breakthrough came in the form of modern day n etworking platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest. These networks support online transfer of various types of file and has actually taken communication to the next level. The journey of social media has been an eventful one and it is expected that with a similar rate of development, soon human being will experience a new world through the eyes of social networking platforms. Properties of social media Social media is referred to as a virtual network or community where users gather to communicate among themselves and at the same time create and exchange information about the various topics. Therefore from the above findings I can conclude that social media acts as a mediator between the users. Some of the key properties of social media are quality, reach, frequency, accessibility, usability, immediacy, and permanence. I believe these aforementioned properties create disparities among the different social media forms and are the reason that leads to various types of social media (Kietzmann, Hermkens, McCarthy & Silvestre, 2011). For example, due to differences in the features we come across two terms, namely social media and industrial media. The major difference between social and industrial media is that industrial media is more expensive. It includes television, newspapers and films. In my opinion, it is important to distinguish different forms of media because without distinction new forms will never emerge and can even act as a hindrance. In the context of the difference between the new forms of media with rational forms is its ability to go viral. Due to the presence of a million of registered users a small issue can go viral through social media. Types of social media As seen above, social media has various features that allow users to accomplish crucial tasks. However, when a discussion about social media is going on, it is a necessity to underline the different types of social media present in the virtual world. From my personal experience as well as consultation of the textbooks, I have found there are 6 different types of social media namely collaborative projects, blogs and micro-blogs, content communities, social networking sites, virtual game worlds, and virtual social worlds (Gillgian, 2011). According to me, all of the aforementioned types of social media has their own significance and can be described as unique,