Social Media Communication

3 Social Media and Computer-Mediated Communication

LEARNING GOALS

This chapter will help you understand:

• What is computer-mediated communication?
• What is social information processing theory?
• How do social media affect personal interaction?
• How do social media affect interaction with information?

KEY CONCEPTS

Social change

Social media

Social movement

Computer-mediated communication

THEORY HIGHLIGHT

Uses and Gratifications Theory

Overview

Nowadays few could imagine that social media were once considered a fad in the early 2000s when they first appeared. Rather, it is evident that social media are here to stay, penetrating various aspects of people’s daily lives and social activities. Researchers agree that social media are all about us. We can fence ourselves in, but can hardly fence them out. Like it or not, social media, functioning as a form of computer-mediated communication (CMC), have profoundly changed the dynamics of human communication and business models. At a societal level, social media help bring about social movements around the globe, ranging from hotel bookings to Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement in 2014.

Social movements, aiming to “establish a new order of life” (Blumer, 1955, p. 19), refer to any organized collective activity to bring about or resist fundamental change in an existing group or society. Schaefer (2012) notes that social movements are more structured than other forms of collective behavior and persist over a longer period. A series of social ...