Social Media

The term social media has been used to define the creation of content in variety of forms that integrate technology and social interaction. The content, and subsequent means of presentation, depends on the ways communities agree to share information and understanding. The core difference between social media and traditional media is the integration of interaction amongst users in the content creation process , which uses technology that allows such interaction. Social media takes a variety of different forms, including wikis, weblogs (blogs), online discussion forums, and text and multimedia content sharing.

Amongst the most popular social media applications are Wikipedia, Facebook, blogspot, YouTube, Windows Live Spaces and Flickr to name only a few.Currently, social media accounts for a significant portion of the content growth that we are currently witnessing. As a matter of fact, social media is quickly overshadowing the content created through “traditional” media.

The birth and growth of “Generation C”

Generation C is a term used to refer to a new generation that is creating and consuming content that is created using social media. The term Generation C was first coined by Trendwatching in 2004. While the C was initially used to refer to content, it currently collectively refers to creativity, content, celebrity and control. The growth of social media is essentially based on personal spaces. People build a personal space and then connect with others to share thoughts or details of their life. This includes sharing photos, video, ideas, and understandings.

They also use it to interact and discuss ideas and thoughts in a communal fashion. Social media also allows users to meet new people. Sites such as Windows Live Spaces, MySpace, and Facebook encourage and allow people to exchange information about themselves and use blogs, email, or instant messaging to communicate with the world-at-large. This form of social media provides an outlet for creativity, allowing users to express their individuality whilst satisfying their need to be part of a community.

How do we use social media

A general misconception that is currently changing is that people use social media and social networking for dating and meeting new people. Statistics in fact support that many are using tools of social networking to stay in touch with friends and family. A significant, and ever growing, portion of users are also using social media to express opinions and views on topics of interest and deepen relationships with like-minded people. The motivation for using social media is related to the basic human principle and needs of self expression, the desire to be part of a community and to extend existing friendships through networks. Users might wish to document and share significant moments with friends. Others, mostly younger generations, use social media for self expression away from mainstream media, where they could play a more active role. The growth of social media is mostly fueled by the ever increasing authoring tools that make creation of content easier and faster than before. Collectively these tools are conversational cyberspaces that integrate content creation, social networking, and communities together.

Social media in the Arab world

One of the main factors that are deterring the widespread use of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in the Arab world has been the lack of appropriate online content in Arabic. Despite the fact that Arabic is the sixth most widely spoken language globally, recent figures have estimated Arabic content at 0.5% of the total online content. Numerous efforts aimed at combating this obstacle through providing systematic content have not been able to narrow this huge gap between demand and supply.User generated content, on the other hand, is luring many users, mostly of the younger generations, and is accounting for the majority of growth of the Arabic content online.

User Generated Content (UGC), also known as Consumer Generated Media (CGM), refers to content created and shared online by non-media professional. The range of this content could be a profile uploaded to a user profile on Facebook, a comment left on a product website or discussion board, or a home video uploaded to YouTube. While many of these forms have existed on the global internet for many years, they have gained a significant momentum in recent years with the growing availability of high-speed internet, search engines, and content creation tools and sharing venues. More so in markets that have been on the chase of the internet era, such as the Arab world, and where the need for self-expression is greater.

Earlier forms of UCG have been on Usenet, which has evolved into online discussion forums. These forums allowed users to communicate amongst a community to discuss specific topics. The range of topics included consumer brands and review sites, where users were also allowed to rate items and subjects based on a set of criteria. These reviews and ratings have greatly influenced and helped users make more informed purchase decisions. Blogs currently spearhead the growth of UCG. As a matter of fact, the introduction of blogs is considered a changing point for UGC. Despite the presence of blogs for a significant amount of time, the presence of blogging tools online has turned them into a global phenomenon. Blogging has spanned a wide range of content, from personal experiences to political perspectives. This phenomenon has incented corporations and political parties to increase their presence on the blogosphere. Wikis are another growing form of community knowledge that represents the most democratic manifestation of UGC. By far, the most popular wiki is Wikipedia, which since its launch in 2001 has grown rapidly to become the most prominent reference site online. As of April 2008, Wikipedia has boasted more than 10 million articles in 253 languages, making it by far the largest encyclopedia ever with over 600 million users annually. The promise of UGC is now being hyper-realized with the growth of social media. Sites such as Facebook, Myspaces, YouTube and Windows Live Spaces represent the convergence of user commentary, sharing of videos, photos, and music in a simple, user-friendly format that allow participation on a mass scale. While Arabic content is still lagging heavily in this space, it is picking up speed and adoption rates are unmatched by any online technology that have preceded it.

Challenges of User Generated Content

There are a few challenges that have faced the growth of user generated content. Amongst the major challenges is the aspect of trust and assessment of quality of the content. The content is also mostly provided in small fragmented chunks that require users to aggregate to develop a more complete understanding of the topic being discussed. Users are also incented to seek a variety of alternative viewpoints on a specific topic to satisfy their needs. In this case, users need to identify influence and authority amongst the vast sea of UGC and on many occasions have trouble determining the entry point for browsing. Motivating users to create vibrant communities and to become active within them remains a huge concern of all social media tools to insure their existence.

Supporting the growth of social media

Blogsmuncher, Understanding the Arabic blogosphere: Blogs are considered amongst the richer social media exposing their writers’ experiences, interests, opinions, and emotions. With the steady increase in the size of the blogosphere, it is becoming increasingly difficult for blog readers to follow what bloggers are discussing. To that end, BlogsMuncher aims at delivering a comprehensive view of what is discussed in the blogosphere while taking into account the geographical and temporal dynamics.

Determining Influence in User Generated Content:Determining influential contributors and content in the vast sea of UGC is essential in a vibrant community. Through the analysis of one of the most important aspect of social media, namely its communal nature, social network analysis can help discover different roles of users and content influential users and content may varying according to context and application.

Mining Conversational Cyberspaces: Automatically assessing online content fragments, based on their quality, is essential to the growth and utilization of social media. Through modeling user perception of quality, users are able to browse, select, and filter UGC to maximize their value add from social media. Machine learning techniques are employed to enable automatic assessment of online UGC, and are key to understanding the online social media community.

Mining Multimedia Content: Enabling efficient and effective access to multimedia (MM) content, including video, audio, and images, is key to increasing the utilization of content. Only through these efficient tools can a user locate relevant information in MM data. In CMIC, we investigate automated tools aiming to describe MM content through a set of audio, video, and social network features. Through machine learning techniques, we can map low level features into high-level concepts such as occurrence of a fire in a surveillance video stream. Applications of this MM mining framework include content-based search, navigation, and summarization in domains such as education, health, and geosciences.

Linking Social Media: With the abundance of UGC, the need to explore several alternative sources of information becomes crucial to enriching the user’ experience. In addition, with the ever increasing amount of UGC, it is essential to organize this content according to each individual user’s interests to enhance several activities as searching, and browsing. Organizing UGC includes a variety of tools and applications including indexing, classification, as well as document/segment linking.

Applying social media in education: The tools of social media are essential for creating Virtual Learning Communities (VLCs). Individual learners use these tools to ask questions, express opinions or enrich the collective experience through sharing and collaboration. However, these tools remain disconnected from one another, and individually each of these tools only partially fulfils the needs of an inclusive educational environment. Through the presentation of a framework to connect these different tools within a VLC, CMIC intends to integrate these tools to enhance the wealth of knowledge in VLCs. This framework is directed to address the problems that arise in high density classes, hence supporting the growth and survival of the increasingly overburdened educational systems.

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