In this blog post, we will examine how social media affects the way we communicate and society as a whole, as well as its importance and influence through various examples.
In 2025, S, a college student, starts his day with a KakaoTalk notification from a friend asking to see his difficult assignment. Having stayed up late the night before exchanging messages with his girlfriend on KakaoTalk, S forgets about his assignment and hurriedly logs into ETL to check it. Frantic, S logs into Cyworld’s community forum and finds a solution posted by a senior to quickly resolve the issue. Feeling a bit more at ease, S checks Facebook on his way to school, catching up on news from his hometown friends and reminiscing about the past. Even while moving between classrooms between classes, he can’t put his smartphone down, checking tweets from his favorite singer. On his way home, he passes the time playing social network games like Tiny Farm and Anipang, which he recently downloaded.
SNS (Social Network Service) refers to services that enable social activities through networks such as the internet or intranet. In a broader sense, all media that enable two-way social communication, including comment services and bulletin board services where users can post their opinions on the internet, can be considered SNS.
However, with the development of mobile culture and the rise in popularity of Twitter and Facebook, similar services are now generally referred to as SNS. The two main features that distinguish SNS from other network services are the existence of a community and the possibility of use as a one-person media. These features are natural results of the social activity characteristics of SNS.
The existence of a community provides the social environment that is essential for social activities. For example, Facebook provides a community where individual opinions can be gathered through a feature that automatically posts them on a wall. It also provides communities where anonymity can be guaranteed, such as groups and pages, enabling various social activities. However, simply providing community functions is not enough. Only when relationships are built among multiple users, enabling networked communication, can a community function as a platform for social activities. For example, school administrative websites like MySnu allow users to post complaints or opinions on bulletin boards. However, this primarily remains at the level of one-on-one question-and-answer interactions and does not facilitate communication among users. Therefore, MySnu cannot be considered a social networking service.
The possibility of utilizing it as a one-person media means that the subject of SNS is not the company providing the service or the large media outlet providing information, but the individual. For example, the comment section of an internet news site meets the conditions of a community mentioned earlier. However, the influence of opinions posted by individuals in an internet comment section is typically much smaller than that of the main article. In contrast, in SNS services, each individual is given an equal opportunity to speak, and there is no entity that can exert an influence greater than that of an individual’s statement.
Based on these two characteristics—whether the focus is on community or on the function of a one-person media—SNS can be categorized into two types, with the former typically referred to as the Facebook type and the latter as the Twitter type, following the names of representative services.
Although the term “SNS” began to be used after Twitter and Facebook gained global popularity, the concept itself originated in the early days of the internet. Traces of social services can be found in early internet networks like ARPANET and Usenet, which were primarily used for military purposes, and early internet portals provided community functions through bulletin board systems (BBS), effectively serving as early forms of SNS. This concept became more concrete in the late 1990s with the emergence of South Korea’s Cyworld and the United States’ MySpace, which gained popularity. Although the term did not exist at the time, the concept of “social activities on a network” as SNS was established. However, the concept spread globally and gained the name “SNS” when ubiquitous networking became possible through smartphones and Facebook gained immense popularity worldwide.
The reason behind the immense popularity of SNS lies in the fundamental human desire for communication. As social beings, humans have always valued communication as an interactive exchange with society and as the bond that allows us to exist within a group. Therefore, communication technology has been one of the most important technologies since ancient times. The core of communication and communication technology lies in how well physical and social factors that hinder communication can be controlled. This is also why SNS is currently so popular. SNS almost completely eliminates physical and social factors in communication between users. Take Twitter as an example. We can freely exchange opinions with Hollywood stars who are on the other side of the globe and whom we consider to have no connection with us through the communication method of tweets. Although a certain degree of real-name system has been introduced, the remaining anonymity allows people to communicate freely without being constrained by social factors such as age and status.
Needless to say, the development of devices such as smartphones, which allow us to access social media anytime, anywhere, has contributed to this. The impact of social media on modern society can be seen in many aspects of society. Take the recent “T24 Social Festival” as an example.
What began as a debate within an online community about whether a single person could set up a military-style 24-person tent escalated through social media, attracting thousands of participants and millions more who expressed their opinions online, turning it into a nationwide festival. Similarly, the Jasmine Revolution, which swept the Islamic and Arab world in the wake of the democratic uprisings, was carried out using the language of social media rather than traditional, easily controlled media.
The advertising industry and many politicians are already actively utilizing social media as a marketing tool and as a new platform for expressing their opinions. The explosive power of social media stems from uncertainty. Since each individual acts as a one-person media outlet, central control is impossible, unlike traditional media. Therefore, its effects are also unpredictable. This is both the greatest strength and the greatest weakness of social media.
This is because it is impossible to control the spread of information that should not be disseminated, such as privacy-related information, or distorted information that circulates as fact. Recently, there have been frequent cases where individuals are subjected to witch-hunts, such as the numerous “XX-girl incidents.” To prevent this, many countries, including South Korea, have begun censoring social media, sparking intense debates between the government’s need to regulate for the sake of public interest and the individual’s right to free speech.
The economic reality of social media is also a highly controversial topic. As mentioned earlier, it is extremely difficult to predict the outcomes of social media, making it nearly impossible to measure its economic impact. Additionally, the very nature of social media requires extensive user participation, leading many services to operate for free to attract users. As a result, generating direct economic revenue from social media is challenging, and accurately calculating such revenue is even more difficult. In fact, KakaoTalk, a leading Korea-based mobile social media service, has recorded annual losses despite having over 10 million users, and is currently focusing on developing a revenue model to generate concrete economic benefits.
So far, we have looked at what social media is, how it has grown, why it has become popular, and the social influence it currently has. Although it is often said to have emerged alongside the internet, social media is still a relatively new concept and remains a medium that is still growing. As a result, it often finds itself at the center of various controversies. However, even setting aside such controversies, it is undeniable that social media has a significant ripple effect on modern society and exerts a profound influence on people’s lives.
