My case study will involve the impact of new and digital media on Facebook.
one. As technology redefines and remaps our world virtually, the consumer firms driving its development are the new mapmakers. Companies like Facebook are feverishly searching the potential of interaction on the web. Google, which has a 90%share of the UK search market, has already built a $197bn business on the back of advertising related to those text searches.
Though the social web is well established, the business model around it is not. This is the new horizon. And the volume and reach of data produced by Facebook's users – and the promise of the future of the social web – has investors so excited that they have just valued the company at $50bn.
For now, Facebook's priority is to keep growing its nascent advertising revenues ($2bn last year, by one estimate) and its user numbers, put at 633 million monthly users globally for October, according to comScore. But it is also laying the foundations for some powerful ways of extending the site. Last August it introduced Places, which allows users to share their location with friends, and in December announced that photo uploads would soon be scanned with facial recognition technology.
Already, one-third of Facebook's traffic is generated by mobile, and as these devices become ubiquitous we will become less reliant on a fixed screen. Often described as the next generation of the web, mobile's real breakthrough has been the success of apps in the past two-and-a-half-years. Not only are these devices always on and always with us, but they offer more forms of interaction than desktop computers, including movement sensitivity, camera and a web connection.
These location features provide the platform and possibility of a world that, not so long ago would have belonged in an ambitious work of science fiction. Augmented reality (AR) is a technique of overlaying information on an image of the real world, usually through our phone's camera. Despite the current clunky incarnations, augmented reality may well become the principal way that the digital world is presented to us. Freed from screens, information will float, contextually, accompanying the user and imparting – probably via a pair of augmented reality glasses – the time of the next bus, messages from a friend in a nearby pub, or a local match from your dating site. Everything you do now at your desktop will be superimposed in real time in the world around you.
two. Facebook = Computer = Now on mobiles = Apps (iPhone) = advertising = Make us see what they want us to.
Grindr = App on Blackberry = More accessible
They could all lead to isolation
Article = Social networking under fresh attack as tide of cyber - scepism sweeps us.
three. Facebook needs to be more accessible for the new era of technology. Meaning on phones and apps.
four. There is no denying how popular social networking has become, and has seemed to gain momentum from the start of this year. This was evident when Twitter doubled its amount of tweets in just over five months, which we recently mentioned.
There are three main contenders in the world of social networking, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube – there are others, but they have a long hill to climb to catch up to the big three. New research by Nielsen has been looking into this phenomenon and some of the results are interesting.
If the figures are to be believed, then Americans spend around 25 percent of their time on the Internet on social networking sites, and it seems that the audience is getting older- just make certain that you do not allow your parents to become a friend on Facebook.
five.
