How the new media is changing us

by Chris Moerdyk · June 20, 2010

This �social media� phenomenon we keep hearing about was first considered to be some sort of passing fad, much like the hula-hoop and mini-skirt. For the uninitiated, the term refers to the way in which mostly young people communicate with and inform each other on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and myriad others.

It is most certainly not a passing fad. Social media has turned out to be a lot more entrenched and widespread than most of us initially believed.

Pope Benedict might not tweet or have a Facebook page of his own, but he seems to know that the new media are here to stay. He has repeatedly called on Catholic communicators to make use of them to spread the Gospel.

On the subject of the social media, American author Erik Qualman�s book Socialnomics is impressive, to say the least. Even more impressive are the new statistics he has added to a video he has produced called the �Social Media Revolution�.

Some critics have questioned his statistics, but I believe that if only a small fraction of these are right, they represent an awesome eye-opener for anyone who still refuses to believe that social media is anything but a passing fad.

Just look at a few of the points Qualman makes:

1. More than 50% of the world�s population is under 30-years-old;

2. Some 96% of them have joined a social network;

3. Facebook tops Google for weekly traffic in the United States, and 60 millions status updates happen on Facebook daily;

4. Social Media has overtaken pornography as the #1 activity on the Web;

5. One out of eight couples married in the US last year met via social media

6. Just look how long it took for various media to reach 50 million users. Radio (38 Years), TV (13 Years), Internet (4 Years), iPod (3 Years)�

7. Facebook added more than 200 million users in less than a year�

8. iPhone�applications�reached a billion in only 9 months�

9. Companies �don�t have a choice on whether they do social media; the question is how well they do it�.

10. If Facebook was a country, it would be the world�s third largest, ahead of the United States and only just behind China and India�

11. Yet, social media sites such as QQ and Renren dominate China;

12. A 2009 US education department study revealed that on average, online students out-performed those receiving face-to-face instruction;

13. 80% of companies use social media for recruitment.

14. The fastest growing segment on Facebook is 55-65 year-old females;

15. Actors Ashton Kutcher and Ellen Degeneres combined have more Twitter followers than the populations of Ireland, Norway, or Panama.

16. Half of the mobile Internet traffic in Britain is for Facebook. People update anywhere, anytime. Imagine what that means to companies for bad customer experiences?

17. The young generation considers e-mail pass� � some universities have stopped distributing e-mail accounts�

18. Instead they are distributing eReaders , iPads, Tablets�

19. News captured by ordinary people ends up on YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, Facebook�there is no place to hide;

20. The second largest search engine in the world is YouTube;

21. While you read this, more than 100 hours of video will be uploaded to�YouTube;

22. Wikipedia has over 15 million articles. Studies show it�s more accurate than Encyclopaedia Britannica, and 78% of these articles are non-English;

23. There are more than 200 million blogs on the Internet today;

24. Because of the speed in which social media enables communication, word-of-mouth now becomes world-of-mouth;

25. If you were paid R1 for every time an article was posted on Wikipedia, you would earn R156,23 per hour;

26. A quarter of search results for the world�s top 20 largest brands are links to user-generated content;

27. Just more than a third of bloggers post opinions about products and brands;

28. 78% of consumers trust peer recommendations, but only 14% trust advertisements;

29. Kindle eBooks outsold paper books last Christmas;

30. Of the 25 largest newspapers, 24 are experiencing record declines in circulation

31. We no longer search for the news, the news finds us, and we will no longer search for products and services, they will find us via social media.

What fascinates me about all this is that it�s not just the younger generation but increasingly people of all age groups who are relying on news they receive from their friends rather than the mass media. And I�m pleased that pornography has been knocked off its top spot on the Internet by something a lot more healthy.