The growth of social media over the past five years has transformed the ways in which the internet is
experienced by most end users. Now the internet is no longer a one-way broadcast delivery system where the
individual user downloads data, information and other resources produced by a relatively small number of
content providers. Instead, the internet is now driven by (and to some extent determined through) the
activities of its ordinary users—what has been described as many-to-many rather than one-to-many
connectivity. The social web is therefore seen to be arranged along substantially different lines than the
cyberspace-era internet of the 1990s and 2000s. This sense of internet use now being a participatory and
collective activity is reflected in the language used to describe social media applications. Social media use is
often described in terms of collaboration, conviviality and creativity. Social media applications are seen to be
open rather than closed, bottom-up rather than top-down. Social media users go online to share and rate,
mash-up and remix, friend and trend. The ways in which the internet is imagined in 2012 is certainly very
different to that of 10 years earlier—hence the coining of the label web 2.0.