Social Media

The Difference between the Internet and the World Wide Web

Posted on by geraldbkennedy

How many times have you used the internet? How times have you surfed the web? Did you know that the internet and the web are not the same thing?

Don’t worry, many people use the terms Internet and World Wide Web (aka. the Web) interchangeably, but in fact the two terms are not synonymous, and this usage is technically incorrect. The Internet and the Web are two separate things.

What most of us think of as the Internet—Google, eBay, and all the rest of it—is actually the World Wide Web. The Internet is the underlying telecommunication network that makes the Web possible.

Read More

A Brief History of Social Media

Posted on by geraldbkennedy

Social media has become the new buzzword in communication circles, and, while the term social media is new, the concept behind it is not.  Kaplan and Haenlein (2010, p.61) define the concept as,

“Internet sites where individuals and groups create and exchange content and engage in person-to-person conversations, interact freely, sharing and discussing information about each other and their lives using a multimedia mix of personal words, pictures, videos and audio”.

These Internet sites appear in many forms such as blogs and microblogs, forums and message boards, social networks, wikis, virtual worlds, social bookmarking, tagging and news, writing communities, digital storytelling and scrapbooking, data, content, image and video sharing, podcast portals, and collective intelligence.  It is difficult to create an exhaustive list of the many forms social media takes, as it is continually evolving and developing, but well-known examples include: Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, WordPress, EveOnline, Wikipedia, Second Life and Reddit.

Read More

Public and/or Private?

Posted on by geraldbkennedy

 “Younger people, one could point out, are the only ones for whom it seems to have sunk in that the idea of a truly private life is already an illusion. Every street in New York has a surveillance camera. Each time you swipe your debit card at Duane Reade or use your MetroCard, that transaction is tracked. Your employer owns your e-mails. The NSA owns your phone calls. Your life is being lived in public whether you choose to acknowledge it or not. So it may be time to consider the possibility that young people who behave as if privacy doesn’t exist are actually the sane people, not the insane ones.” (Emily Nussbaum, New York magazine, February 2007)

Read More