Social Media: Enabling Technologies and Characteristics
Like the print and electronic media that preceded them, social media are
communication channels. More precisely,
Social media is a set of technologies and channels targeted at forming and
enabling a potentially massive community of participants to productively
collaborate. IT tools to support collaboration have existed for decades. But
social media technologies, such as social networking, wikis and blogs, enable
collaboration on a much grander scale and support tapping the power of the
collective in ways previously unachievable.
(Bradley, 2010, para. 2)
Social media derive from a business model employed to gain advantage from user-
generated content, content that is created by and with other Web users. They
utilize free and easy-to-use technologies and approaches to the Internet often
labeled "Web 2.0." Tim O'Reilly, of California-based O'Reilly Media, is widely
credited with the term and describes the concept as "the network as platform,
spanning all connected devices" and "delivering software as a continually-updated
service that gets better the more people use it, . . . through an 'architecture of
participation,'" (2007, p. 17). Initially, Adobe Flash provided interactivity and