Celebrity culture been always a hot
and social topic and their culture influence people globally. Today, people
often receive the news and gossips about celebrity mostly from social media
sources. Kaplan and Haenlein (2010, pp. 59-60) describes social media as “a
group of Internet-based applications that build on the ideological and
technological foundations of web 2.0 and that allow the creation and exchange
of user generated content”. Social media is “the process where people
participate in conversations and share content online”. Social media is not
like the traditional media. The traditional media is mostly one way
communication but social media is two way communications because people can
participate in the message and conversation. Therefore, this week I will
discuss about social media and how it is influencing our way in engaging with
news and global affairs, focusing on celebrity news and gossips. And with
social media, I will also discuss more about the globalisation media flows,
Americanisation and globalisation in general.
Social media changes the way we engage
in news and global affairs. According to Heinonen (2011), people are not
“passive recipients” of information anymore on social media but they are now
“contributing actively” to the content. People don’t just receive news and
gossips about celebrities from the television, newspaper or magazines, but they
can receive the news and gossips faster if they go on to the social media
sources. From time to time, the traditional media even has to gather their
sources from social media first until they get a more reliable source. About
global affairs on social media, can you believe that the breaking news people
get about the death of Osama bin Laden was from Twitter? Yes! According to NPR
(2011), a man in Abbottabad, Pakistan, tweeted about the details of the U.S.
raid on bin Laden’s hiding place and the man’s home was near the place. According
to Sysomos, in NPR (2011), within hours, the death of bin Laden was the hot
topic on Twitter with more than 2.2 million mentions and nearly 40,000 blog
posts. People are now going to social media for news first and if they need
more details, they will go to traditional media. Evans (2008) describes that
people use Twitter to share interests, information and to find out news and
what is happening in the world in real time.
Social
Media Usage in Australia (Source: Sensis, 2012)
According to Sensis (2012), Facebook is the leading social network
platform for Australia, with 97% of social network users using Facebook, and
that is about 10.7 million users. 16% are on Linked in and that is about 3
million users, 14% on Twitter, 8% on Google+ and 9% on other social network
platforms. Facebook is the main social media that Australians use, and with
10.7 million users, that is almost half of the Australian population. This
statistics show that more and more people are using social media and it is very
likely that people will receive news about celebrities and other global affairs
on social media. On Facebook, they can ‘like’ the celebrities’ fan page or
other fan pages of the celebrities. On Twitter, fans can also ‘follow’ their
favourite celebrity’s account. From Twitaholic (2012), it can see that the top
5 most followed accounts are celebrities. Lady Gaga is first with more than 30
million followers and Justin Bieber is second with more than 28 million
followers. Just this week, Justin Bieber vomited during a concert and he
tweeted about it, “and…Milk as a bad choice! Lol.” (Sydney Morning Herald,
2012). And people can also find many videos of him vomiting on stage on
YouTube, which is the most watched YouTube videos this week. In less than one week,
one of the videos been already has more than 14 million views and it has more
than 40,000 comments.
To show how easy people can get news
from social media sources, I found a blog showing the announcement of Facebook
reaching one billion monthly active users. On Socialbakers’ (2012) blog, it
shows the Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook announcement. As seen on the Facebook
post, it received more than 450,000 ‘likes’ in less than 4 hours. This means
that people first heard about the news on Facebook and it has reached hundreds
of thousands of people just on the social media platform within hours. But what
does this one billion monthly active users mean? It is globalisation! As
discussed in the week one post, globalisation brings together the different
opinions and views people has, and as time goes on, this changes other people’s
opinions and views as well. On Facebook, there is a globalised society of one
billion users who can interact with each other and share their story and
culture.
Americanisation is also more obvious
because of social media. Social media has the power to influence people more
than the traditional media. Americanisation simply means that the rest of the
world is influence by the American culture. First, how did Facebook even reach
one billion active users? This can explained because of Americanisation. Facebook,
Twitter and YouTube all come from America, and because of the increasing
popular of the social media platforms, people from around the world started
using it as well. They are popular because it can connect people from
everywhere and people can learn about interesting things about other parts of
the world that cannot be seen in where they live at. The Chinese popular social
network platform, Weibo, is also created because of Americanisation. Weibo’s
features are entirely the same as Twitter. Not only are people Americanised by
the American social media use but social media also help bring other American
cultures to the rest of the world. This is especially true for the celebrity
culture because as showed on Twitaholic (2012), the top 5 most followed
accounts are American celebrities. If we look down more, the top 27 accounts
are all owned by Americans. This means that they have the most influence to the
rest of the Twitter account from around the world.
I will also discuss about
globalisation media flows in terms of social media. Media flows are about the
rapid increase and uniting of the global media empires. None of the social
media platforms can officially called as global media empire, but their
influence is definitely very powerful. YouTube is the most popular social media
platform for video sharing. It is the main source of entertainment of videos
from people around the world. It is not the uniting of media empires, but it
brings together all the videos shared by people. These videos even include the
ones that can be seen on the traditional media such as news, television shows,
television series, movies and more. Sometimes it is not legal but media is
flowing on to a globalised platform, YouTube.
References
Evans, D. (2008). Social Media
Marketing: An hour a day. John Wiley
& Sons.
Heinonen, K. (2011). “Consumer Activity in Social Media: Managerial Approaches to Consumers'
Social Media Behaviour”. Journal
of Consumer Behaviour. Volume 10. Issue 6. pp. 356-364.
Kaplan, A. M. & Haenlein, M.
(2010). "Users of the world, unite! The challenges and opportunities of
Social Media". Business Horizons.
Volume 53. Issue 1. pp. 59-68
NPR. (2011). On Social Media,
Americans React to Bin Laden Death. Retrieved on October 5th, 2012,
from < http://www.npr.org/2011/05/03/135932108/on-social-media-americans-react-to-bin-laden-death>
Sensis. (2012). Yellow Social Media Report. Retrieved on October 5th,
2012, from
Socialbakers. (2012). Socialbakers
Congratulates Facebook On 1 Billion Active Users. Retrieved on October 5th,
2012, from < http://www.socialbakers.com/blog/897-socialbakers-congratulates-facebook-on-1-billion-active-users>
Sydney Morning Herald. (2012). Justin
Bieber vomits on stage. Retrieved on October 5th, 2012, from
YouTube. (2012). Justin Bieber Throws
Up on Stage in Arizona. Retrieved on October 5th, 2012, from
