Social Media and Academics Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words

Social Media and Academics - Essay Example New media technology is highly associated with the transfer of information that is designated to be manipulated in some way. There are basic traits that are common to all forms of new media technology that confirm that social media is a form of new media. First, all forms of new media technology can be utilized in nearly all the markets across the world, that is, they are not bound or limited to any geographical factor such as distance. New media technologies also have the great level and speed of communication, which is attributed to the fact that they highly utilize the internet. Thirdly, the high level of interactivity enables the users to adopt new methodologies while they are transferring their own information. Fourthly, the new media technologies can incorporate other forms of communication such as telephony and video, which were previously isolated by old media (Leah and Sonia, 2002). Based on this traits, it is correct to assert that social media is a form of new media since the studies by Neal (2012), equally stated that various social media sites have the traits listed above. Social media sites The discussion in this present study will be referring to social media sites such as Facebook, which is the world’s most popular social media sites, followed by Twitter. LinkedIn is a popular social networking site mainly for businesspersons and professional while academia.edu is a social networking site for researchers and academicians. Other popular social media networking sites with mixed capabilities include MySpace, Google Plus, and Tagged, among others. According to Leah and Sonia (2002), one of the most critical features of these social media sites is interactivity. In this regard, the authors stated that social media technologies have the capacity to enable user-to-user interactivity and interactivity between the information and the user. This statement tends to prove that social media has brought about a paradigm shift that existed in the tradit ional model of communication which was â€Å"one-to-many† i.e. mass media communication. However, social media has enabled communicated to be conducted via the approach of â€Å"many to many† communication i.e. individualization media. Oliver (2007) further stated that interactivity option in most social media sites has so far been enabled by media convergence, the digitalization of media and dissemination of internet access points. The interactive capabilities of social media sites enable it to be applied for various uses that include socialization, educational, marketing, and a medium of communication. How social media is linked to academics As it has been noted above social media, has great capabilities of improving the interactivity between users and therefore, from an academic's perspective Joosten (2012), stated that it has recently been integrated into the online learning or e-learning platform, whereby besides using the official e-learning websites, the teacher s and learners also interact with each other via social media sites. In the writings by Wankel (2011), he stated that social media has created a link with academics since learners have developed their own links or pages whereby they interact and share notes as well as ideas that pertain to their learning process.