Communications - July 2011

Society | DOI: 10.1145/1965724.1965732
Dennis McCafferty
Brave, new
Social World
How three different individuals in three different
countries—Brazil, Egypt, and Japan—use Facebook,
Twitter, and other social-media tools.

TODAy, sOCiAL meDiA is emerging as a dominant form of instant global com- munication. Growing more addictively popular by the day—nearly two-thirds of Internet users worldwide use some type of social media, according to an industry estimate—Facebook, Twitter, and other easily accessible online tools deepen our interaction with societies near and far.

Consider these numbers: Facebook is poised to hit 700 million users and, as seven of 10 Facebook members reside outside the U.S., more than 70 global-language translations. Twitter’s user numbers will reportedly hit 200 million later this year, and users can tweet in multiple languages. In terms of daily usage, Facebook generates the second-most traffic of any site in the world, according to Alexa.com, a Web information company, at press time. (Google is number one.) As for blogging, which now seems likes a relatively old-fashioned form of social media, the dominant site, blogger.com, ranks eighth. As for Twitter, it’s now 11th— and climbing.

PhotograPh t WeeteD By rIcharD engel nBc on frIDay Jan 28, 2011 WItness.org

nearly two-thirds
of Internet users
worldwide use some
type of social media,
according to an
industry estimate.

A protestor’s sign thanks the youth of Egypt and Facebook during the political unrest in Egypt in late January. The photo, by an nBC foreign correspondent, first appeared on Twitter.

The top five nations in terms of social media usage are the U.S., Poland, Great Britain, South Korea, and France, according to the Pew Research Center. But beyond international rankings and traffic numbers, there’s much diversity in the manner in which the citizens of the world take advantage of these tools, according to Blogging Around the Globe: Motivations, Privacy Concerns and Social Networking, an IBM Tokyo research report. In Japan, blogs often serve as outlets for personal expression and diary-style postings. In the U.S., it’s mostly about earning income or promoting an agenda. In the U.K., it’s a combination of these needs, as well as professional advancement and acting as a citizen journalist.

Communications connected with
three citizens in three different na-
tions, each of whom are finding their
own individual voice through these
resources. In fact, we depended pri-
marily upon social media to initially
reach them. One is a Japanese female
blogger who segues seamlessly from
pop-culture observations to revealing
reflections on the nation’s recent earth-
quake, tsunami, and nuclear disaster.
Another is a Brazilian businesswoman
who uses multiple digital outlets to
expand her marketing reach through-
out the world. The third is an Egyptian
newsman who is helping record his-
tory with his dispatches of daily life in
a region undergoing dramatic politi-
cal change. (In terms of social media
usage, Brazil ranks eighth, Japan 12th,
and Egypt 18th, according to Pew.) Here
are their stories.