In todays lecture we discussed new media first of all. we discusssed themes from internet studies. first of all we discussed the virtual community and the individual identity. this is examined in depth in Howard Rheinholds book the Virtual Reality (1993). The individuals identity is also examined in Sherry Turkles book "Life on the Screen" (1995). It was put forward that the internets social media sites have developed from being specialised sites from the early days in the 90s where people would chat online mainly if they were infact using the internet at all to huge sites that we have today that millions of people use eg facebook etc. it was also noted that people obviously upload pictures and create profiles to portray differnt alternative profiles to other than who they really are.
the year 2000 saw the advent of web 2.0 due to the dot com crash. this event saw the innovation of various including tagging, user generated content and open API.
Social media essentially includes 1. weblogs/blogs eg microblogs and twitter. 2.social network services eg facebook, and 3. content sharing communities eg youtube. social media has taken a leap in the last five years or so from "geeky" to "normal" as a person almost feeling out of place in todays society if they are not savy to sites such as facebook etc.