Popular Media and Society COM - 209 – 502 The Cocoon Effect of new media Done by: Shamma Abdulla Al Falasi ID: 200705489 Under the supervision of: Mrs. Cathy Strong
The Cocoon Effect of new media Does new style of media cause people to be recluse, hermits because they don’t need to socialize with others? The life style in each community usually comes from the ideology and the common values in that society, in addition to how they look to the human members of the community and how they define the concept of “humanity”. Recently, the new media played a fundamental role in the change or the development of this view as the media in the contemporary world has become a competitor of the family in the path of education and guidance for the individuals. From this point, we can guess that mass media are increasingly serving the needs of more specialized audiences. The common mass media that we are all familiar to are TV networks, Magazines, Radio stations. Those mass media are the best examples of the trend, with their highly targeted audience. Moreover, technology is increasingly directing individuals, day after day, toward more and more various content of selective options, that varies between web pages like Facebook, and other audio devices like TiVo and iPod. One important example of the new media controlling individuals’ life is the social networking. It is based on a certain structures that allow people to both express their individuality and meet people with similar interests. This structure includes having profiles, friends, blog posts, widgets, and usually something unique to that particular social networking website. This encourages individuals to get an access to a place where they can make new society, which leads to “human cocooning”. The thing that we all can agree about is that if this trend continues directing peoples’ social actions it will shift from being something good to a thing that affect the individuals negatively. This phenomenon has been labeled the “cocoon effect” by sociologists. As it is mentioned in the Textbook, from the sociologists’ perspective, this term refers to the process
“whereby people surrounded themselves with only the political and social information that they find comforting, appealing, or acceptable”. Every phenomenon has advantages and disadvantages, as the social networking and the internet surfing have. Some of the advantages are that it motivates people to LIME (Learn / Influence / Meet / Entertain), and it is makes the world a small village, moreover, it increases the interaction across culture, in addition to that it is an important source of knowledge. However, it has lots of disadvantages, such as, inappropriate language, nudity, sexually provocative images, some social networking services allow people to view profiles without logging on. And the most important disadvantage is that is helps to isolate some individuals from their families and friends. According to the Pew Internet and American Life Project “Social Isolation and New Technology”, “We found that the extent of social isolation has hardly changed since 1985, contrary to concerns that the prevalence of severe isolation has tripled since then, 6% of the adult population has no one with whom they can discuss important matters or who they consider to be “especially significant” in their life”. So, by depending totally on the mass media devices, people are going to put themselves into an informational cocoon, to entertain themselves with what they see suitable, and escape from the uncertainty of modern life. Generally, cocooning affect the individual to be isolated from society, and live with the total dependence on the devices, that – on the individual’s opinion – can be his family, friends, and society.
Facts and statistics:
The graph on the left demonstrates the gender distribution for some social networks, like my space.
According to Comscore, and based on the numbers of unique worldwide visitors, these are the top five social media sites of 2008: Blogger: 222 million visitors Facebook: 200 million visitors MySpace:126 million visitors Wordpress:114 million visitors Windows Live Spaces: 87 million visitors http://socialnetworking.lovetoknow.com/Facts_on_Social_Media
References:
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http://arstechnica.com/old/content/2007/07/report-south-korea-tops-in-social-network-us-fifth.ars
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http://www.netaddiction.com/
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http://visualrevenue.com/blog/2007/08/online-social-network-participation.html
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http://www.desishades.com/images/socialnetworking3.jpg
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http://www.smemon.com/social-networking-advantages-and-disadvantages/
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lYoAwfh4QOU
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http://pipl.com/statistics/social-networks/5-facts/
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http://www.bradbaldwin.com/2007/10/24/world-wide-social-networking-users-by-location/