Blog #5 Social Media

Illustration by Stephen Downes on the differences between "groups" and "networks".

Stephen Downes explains that a group is a collection of entities or members according to their nature.  A network is an association of entities or members where this association is facilitated or created by a set of connections between those entities.  To read in more detail about Stephen Downes' illustration go to: http://www.downes.ca/post/42521

http://www.digiactive.org/topic/collective-intelligence/

I liked this website because I actually understood what the author was talking about.  Gauray Mishra, the author of the article discusses the fact that social media can be confusion for two reasons, first is the excessive focus on specific social media tools which can become overwhelming and second is a clear definition of what social media is, even within the social media community.  Terms like social media, digital media, new media, citizen media, participatory media, peer-to-peer media, social web, participatory web, peer-to-peer web, read write web, social computing, social software, and web 2.0 can mean similar or slightly different things depending upon who is using it.  Gauray Mishra focuses on four themes in social media instead of getting distracted by tools and terminologies.  He calls them the 4Cs of social media: Content, Collaboration, Community, and Collective Intelligence.  He believes that the buzzwords will change but the value system that is embedded in the 4Cs is here to stay.

Content: Social media tools allows everyone to become a creator

Collaboration: Social media facilitates the aggregation of small individual actions into meaningful collective results. 

Community: Social media facilities sustained collaboration around a shared idea, over time and often across space.

Collective Intelligence: Social web enables us to not only aggregate individual actions, but also run sophisticated algorithms on them and extract meaning from them.