CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION
1.1 Background of the Study
A century and half ago, communication between countries involved physical presence. Once, a reporter had to run as fast as possible back to the newsroom after interviewing and tried to beat the competition to print. With the advent of the digital age the role of the journalist changed. The inception of information communication technology such as the internet has made it possible to find out about events without actually being there. Journalists can report news across the world over the internet.
Throughout history, developments in technology and communication have gone hand-in-hand, and the latest technological developments such as the internet have resulted in the advancement of the science of communication to a new level. The process of human communication has evolved over the years, with many path- breaking inventions and discoveries heralding revolutions. The invention of pictographs or the first written communication in the ancient world brought about written communication. These writings were on stone, and remained immobile. The invention of paper, papyrus and wax, culminating in the invention of the printing press in the 15th century made possible transfer of documents from one place to another, allowing for uniformity of languages over long distances. The latest revolution is the widespread application of electronic technology such as electronic waves and signals to communication, manifesting in the electronic creation and transfer of documents over the World Wide Web (www.wikipediathefreeencyclopedia.com)
Social media which are a form of electronic communication have become the highest activity on the internet. They refer to social networking websites developed to specifically help people share their views and stay in touch with their friends, relatives and well-wishers.According to Wikipedia, social media represents a shift in how people discover, read and share news, information content which brought about the democratization of information, transforming people from content readers into publishers.Social media are also internet sites where people interact freely, sharing and discussing information about each other and their lives, using a multi-media mix of personal words, pictures, videos and audio (Bruce and Douglas; 2008, p.27). In order to broaden our knowledge on the topic of study, a brief history of social media will be discussed below.
In the early 1990s, chat rooms and bulletin boards were forms of social media; in that they helped people connect with others and share interests.A little later,dating sites hooked together those looking for partners, and Classmate.com.let people connect with people they had known in high school and college.In the early 2000s, a site called Friendster was set up where people invited their friends to join and in turn, those friends invited other friends.The site was popular for a while but it suffered from technical difficulties and fake profiles and began losing members.Some of those members went to MySpace,which had actually started in 1999 but became better known in 2003.Its roots are a little muddy because it received financial and logistical support from another company called eUniverse, and most of the early users were eUniverse employees but Tom Anderson and Chris DeWolfe are given credit for much of the innovations and success of the site which built up to 115 million users worldwide. Members post bios, photos, blogs, videos, and other things that strike their fancy, and some TV programmes to air on MySpace. In 2005, Rupert Murdoch‟s News Corporation (parent of Fox Broadcasting) bought MySpace for 580 million dollars. A competitor to MySpace, Facebook was started in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg while he was a student at Harvard University; it grew up rapidly about 2007. At first Facebook was solely for college and high school students, but Zuckerberg opened it to everyone and like MySpace, it encourages all types of member postings (Lynn Gross, 2010). Apart from the above mentioned social media tools,there are also others. These include; Twitter, YouTube, BlackBerry Messenger, Flickr, Word Press, Blogger, Badoo, Live Journal, Wikipedia, Type Pad, Second Life, Lulu, and many others. All these social media appear in many forms including 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, video sharing, podcast portals and collective intelligence.