Social and Cultural Impact of the new media

By Ayara, Margaret

ABSTRACT

Technology-advanced communication has an impact on and influences cultures. Some people think that social media, which has been a powerful tool for shaping society and influencing human behavior, is to blame for the influences.

Social media may have been able to cross cultural boundaries thanks to the idea of borderlessness. It is possible to think of the social networking site as the platform that united people from various ethnic origins. A cultural invasion can get underway via social media.

There are many extra social media sites with influencers who might support specific behaviors and ideals. Local cultures progressively vanished as a result, to be substituted by a multicultural phenomenon. Other cultures may have an impact on how people act, think, and value things as well as fashion and way of life.

This study looked at the socio-cultural impact of the new media in Nigeria with the aim of striking a connection between the social aspect of the new media and the way we behave generally in the society.

The study used the theory of Affordances as its theoretical guide. The study concludes that the identities created on the social media have the potential of altering the everyday culture of the Nigerian society or any other society.

This is because the society is filled with young people who constantly engage in social media interactions for both productive and other reasons making it a constant point of contact for daily actions and decisions. This interface with new media platforms using social media as a focus have a great tendency to alter or refine culture.

It is therefore recommended that social media contents should be refined and censored to trim out contents that are harmful to our cultural perspectives such as bad dressing, drug abuse. The need for creative use of social media for cultural engineering should be emphasized in many for a and educational systems.
KEYWORDS SOCIAL MEDIA, CULTURE, ENCULTURATION.

INTRODUCTION
The world keep transforming and the discipline of electronic communications has advanced significantly in the twenty-first century. Numerous communication methods have been established by ultra-modern technology, making humans almost completely dependent on it. Without technological technologies like mobile phones, satellite or cable TVs, VR & AV capture equipment, CCTVs, etc., modern living would be nearly impossible to comprehend (Singh, 2019).

These gadgets have ingrained themselves into our daily routines, our way of life, and we are accustomed to communicating with them (Singh, 2019). The media’s involvement in social interaction is just as old as the media itself, but at first it was primarily for information distribution.

Being a language-based medium of communication, media has developed into social media and begun to play a significant role as a language. And we no longer only rely on verbal communication, handwritten letters, bodily expressions of emotion, touch sensations, or other means.

Additionally, we are reinventing our experience of communication and the reliability of meaning formation without the use of senses and direct stimulation thanks to current, sophisticated electronics.

Personalised physical communications and basic emotional behaviours in individuals are being replaced by artificial sensory simulations (Singh, 2019). As a result, it is developing a range of multifaceted communication skills that are impacting the media and social environment.

The media today is influencing our daily decisions and intruding in every aspect of our lives, playing a significant part in how we live. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that media controls our life. It does not, however, imply that media is now an unrestricted event.

There is no doubt that this Neo-Capitalist Medium has begun to make significant changes in the history of humanity by prioritising completely irresponsible and consumerist desires.

The common people must bear the brunt when media is utilised for dishonest political practises and turns into a tool to wield influence for them, as has been evident over the past 45 years. As evidenced by the tragic 9/11 incidents, the internet has the ability to have a greater influence (Singh, 2019).

To “stay informed of events and disseminate messages and letters written on papyrus across the empire during the Roman era, individuals like Cicero depended on the connections of friends, copyists, and community bulletin boards (Standage, 2013).

Martin Luther, a German monk, identified the printing press’s potential as a new form of communication after Gutenberg created the moveable type printing press. In 1517, Luther put a list of 95 theses (written in Latin) on the door of a cathedral in an effort to engage in a theological argument with another monk and in the customary way for the period.”

One of the earliest instances of a post going viral was when copies immediately circulated around Germany and were republished by printers in the country. “He composed his second piece, a little booklet, in straightforward German after realising the power of this new form of communication and wanting to reach a larger audience.

Inadvertently dividing the Catholic Church, Luther’s article and subsequent publications also created the modern German language, put an end to Rome’s political hegemony, and aided the rise of countries throughout Europe (Sandel & Ju, 2019).

The conclusion that communication media can and do play a significant part in the formation of empires, nations, communities, and culturally moulded identities can be drawn from these and other historical occurrences.”

“In a well-known essay on the birth and development of nations, Anderson (1991) examined the history of the concept of a nation and demonstrated how imagined communities are created via the practise of creating and consuming print media, including daily newspapers and regional books.

The person reading the newspaper imagines that others in the same country are also learning about the news and events covered in the paper. Readers are seen as being connected as citizens of the same country. As a result, in the twenty-first century, every inhabited region of the globe is divided into unique nations with clearly defined physical borders, and almost all of its inhabitants are created to be citizens of separate states” (Sandel & Ju, 2019).

When the functions of additional 20th-century communication technologies, such as radio and television, are taken into account, Anderson’s (1991) ideas about connections between media and the formation of the nation-state can be expanded.

For instance, the BBC’s radio programmes had a significant role in preserving public morale and social cohesiveness in Britain during World War II (Crisell, 1994). Television coverage of the tragic occurrence of John F. Kennedy’s shooting in 1963 allowed viewers all throughout the country to witness and feel it at the same time (Berg, 1995).

And “most television watchers throughout the world felt unified in the horror and agony of the event when the World Trade Centre collapsed on September 11, 2001 (Chouliaraki, 2008). These and other significant events can unite and mobilise a viewing and listening public, as well as foster a mental reaction of an affiliative bond among people who, lacking a mediated connection, would not be aware of the event or of one another.

As Anderson (1991 cited in Sandel & Ju, 2019) contended, this means that a relationship between imaginary people belonging to a nation can be so deep that they wage war against citizens from a different nation, willing to give their lives and means of subsistence.”

However, it was argued that television, whether under state or commercial control, made it easier to create a passive audience that was dependent on entertainment (Postman, 2005).

Television viewers passively observed the world rather than developing an involved and knowledgeable; the longer individuals devoted to television, the more terrified they became of the violent society people witnessed on screen (Sandel & Ju, 2019), and this fear increased as the audience becomes more interested in solving societal problems such as criminality or ethnic and economic disparities.

Thus, even though television was widely used, successful, and popular as a one-to-many communication medium in the 20th century, it may have had certain flaws. A medium might be seen as more appealing if it allows for a more engaged and active audience or if it enables one person among many to produce and share original material. We now witness the growth of social media.

We describe culture as a set of socially constructed assumptions, norms, and symbols that govern how people interact with one another (Philipsen, 1997, p. 126) in order to understand social media. To put it another way, “culture is not only something that “other people have.”

Instead, culture is what people develop as a manual on how to behave in social contexts. Another interpretive lens for analysing how people make social movements is culture.

For instance, a wedding can be rated as good if the couples seem compatible to the guests and/or families, or as a bad if the couples are highly dissimilar, depending on how culturally and locally created conceptions of what constitutes difference are read. In other words, culture is both a noun; the thing that can be publicly judged as being performed well or not and a verb; the series of events that take place in a particular scene or event and determine the order of interactions.”

Then, using culture as a concept, one may analyse how social media works, which “provide rich and varied environments for interactional encounters and exchanges between increasingly inter-connected networks of users” (Burger, Thornborrow, & Fitzgerald, 2017, p. 25).

In other words, social media offers ways to communicate that alter perceptions of place and space, enabling users to overcome offline barriers and establish novel, occasionally surprising settings and modes of group engagement.

However, these novel methods of social media connection are not without limitations. Similar to what occurs culturally offline, patterns develop, symbols are generated and interpreted, and rules are developed to govern online interaction.

Such online conduct can be understood as a logical extension of societal notions of interpersonal relations and friendship that exist offline. Thus, it is essential to comprehend how social media influence culture and this is what necessitated this study.

OVERVIEW OF PAPER OBJECTIVES
The overwhelming influence of technology especially the social media on the way we live and behave in Nigeria has been a thing of concern. This is because the social media seem to have some effects on the patterning of human lives such that it has become a key decider of information circulation in the society which in turn affects the reasoning process of the people. The focus of this study is to analyze the various aspects of social media that affects culture using the Nigerian culture as the reference point.

THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK
THEORY OF AFFONDANCES
This theory was propounded by Gibbson in 1979. According to this theory of human perception, we view our surroundings in terms of what they allow or provide us. According to Nagy and Neff (2015), affordances are characteristics of tools that influence behaviour in design research.

However, when applying Gibson’s theory to communications technologies, some modern researchers claim that affordances are actually dynamic connections between actors and tool features rather than phenomena that reside in devices and platforms per se (Volkoff & Strong, 2017).

Affordances are not fundamental characteristics of tools nor are they solely perceived by human actors; rather, they are emergent, relational properties of animal-environment systems (Chemero & Turvey, 2007; p. 34).

As opposed to this, the chances for action made possible by communication technologies are both materially and socially formed.
This “viewpoint on affordances is crucial because it provides a compromise between constructivism and realism epistemologies (Hutchby, 2001).

Constructivist epistemologies may overlook how material characteristics of communication technologies constrain or permit social constructions of use, in contrast to realist epistemologies which might result in technological determinism.

According to our theory, communication technologies are made in a way that reflects the cultural prejudices of their designers and suggests to the user how they should be used; however, people’s perceptions and actualizations of potential courses of action depend on the opportunities and constraints in their specific social contexts.”

Multi-methodological methods that take into consideration the relational and functional affordances of communication technologies are required to fully account for both of these processes.

The transition from childhood to adulthood can be placed within the context of greater technological and societal development by looking at communication technologies as cultural tools with dynamic affordances. Boyd (2010) highlights Negroponte’s (1995) notion of a fundamental transition from “atoms to bits” in her summary of the functional affordances of digitization that extended throughout society in the late 1990s.

According to this perspective, digitization fundamentally changed how media existed and was distributed since it liberated content (bits) from atomic-level physical containers like DVDs or books. Boyd contends that this modification produced new chances for communication to endure, duplicate, grow, and be searched.

Before digital communication, “bits” could not be dispersed and localised to the extent that they could now, paving the way for novel social dynamics in online networked publics.

Indeed, teenagers and young adults are among the first to utilise social media and digital communication tools, frequently modelling for or influencing how their parents use these platforms (Correa, 2014; McKenzie et al., 2019).

Additionally, because they are a target audience for social media businesses, their evolving requirements for social approval and self-expression may spur technological advancements. According to Kobak et al. (2017), developmental demands can be thought of as incentives for resources that support development.

Particularly in Western post-industrialized nations, “motivations to be socially accepted for who one might encourage self-exploration and commitment, intrapersonal and interpersonal processes that are essential to healthy identity formation” (Harter et al., 1997; Harter, 2015).

Engineers create social media platforms to satisfy these identity demands, incorporating novel elements into teenage communication including visuality and quantifiability that alter feelings of friendship and peer groups (Nesi et al., 2018).

Youth are participating in social constructions of how the newest applications should be used as they use them, sometimes in ways that the designers never intended, like using a “finsta” (fake Instagram account) to present a more authentic and individual version of oneself (Dewar et al., 2019; Kang & Wei, 2019).

Through their involvement in the continual development of technology affordances as well as their role as content producers, adolescents and emerging adults are significant agents of cultural change. Youth are using social media to create content and are doing so through “scalable sociality” (Miller et al., 2016) or “mass personal communication” (O’Sullivan & Carr, 2017), which are terms for group social spaces that exist on a spectrum between the private and the public.

Metavoicing is described as engaging in the ongoing online knowledge conversation by reacting online to others’ presence, profiles, content, and activities” (Majchrzak et al., 2013; p. 6). It is comparable to scalable sociality and mass personal communication.

All of these ideas highlight how social media has provided young people new opportunities to engage in public discourse about personal and social issues that are important to their identities (Kahne et al., 2016; Tynes et al., 2011).

The implication of this theory on the study is that the youths being the drivers of social media platforms are the key controllers of cultural proliferation on these platforms through the messages they send online. All the interactions on the social media leads to the exchange of identities and this affects culture. What is allowed online contributes too cultural perspectives.

SOCIAL ASPECT OF THR NEW MEDIA: THE PARTICIPATORY CULTURE
The social media represents the social aspect of the new media. The term social media refers to a phenomenon that appeared at the beginning of the twenty-first century at the height of the internet boom (Boyd, 2015).

“Scientists and software developers perceived in Web 2.0 an internet that conveniently allows the generation of user generated content (UGC), in contrast with different forms of media which are linked with a recognisable technological advances, such as television or radio” (Baym, 2015).

It provides a chance to develop online technologies that support social interaction, coordination, and connection (Boyd, 2015, p. 1). Social media can be viewed as a “set of tools, practises, and ideologies” rather than just a set of technological affordances, When viewed in this light, modern social media can be seen as serving a similar purpose and serving a comparable role to Martin Luther’s discussion postings on a cathedral door and Cicero’s usage of public bulletin boards in ancient Rome.

Social media’s goal and role is to give people easy access to instruments for communication and social interaction, freeing them from the limitations of the one-to-one affordances of 20th-century mass media technology. We observe this in a range of online resources, including “blogs, discussion forums, wikis and social media networks” (Sleeman, Lang, & Lemon, 2016, p. 392).

A variety of social networking sites that catered to a certain demographic were developed after 2003. These included websites like MyChurch, which links Christian churches and their members, LinkedIn for business professionals, and Couchsurfing for travellers looking for free lodging (Boyd & Ellison, 2008).

In addition, websites that were initially geared towards sharing media, like Flickr and YouTube, started to incorporate SNS features, like enabling users to submit and reply to comments (Sandel & Ju, 2019).
Social media are an ever-evolving and expanding phenomenon since they are not connected to any one type of communication technology (such as television or radio), but rather are a collection of internet tools that are used to connect and interact between people.

For instance, American television networks reacted by offering material on social media in response to a decline in viewing among younger viewers (Ferguson & Greer, 2016). Netflix promoted its material on Twitter alongside other social media sites (Gómez & Quevedo, 2018).

And by focusing on their online clients and designing an engaging setting for product viewing, online display entertainment platforms (such as Apple, Amazon, and Netflix) increased their market share on the basis of “connected viewing” (Cunningham, Craig, & Silver, 2016).

Each of these developments highlights social media characteristics and technological capabilities that set them apart from traditional media and, in the users’ perceptions, may even outperform them in many aspects including its influence on enculturation.

NEW MEDIA AS TOOL FOR ENCULTURATION AND ACCULTURATION
Western nations’ cultural diversity has grown dramatically over the past century (Coleman 2008; Eurostat 2015; Schwartz et al. 2010); at the same time, global interconnection and integration have grown (Jamal 2005).

The marketplace is therefore defined by market integration and continuous distinctions driven by racial, ethnic, religious, and national concerns (Pealoza and Gilly 1999). Migration and associated issues are hotly argued and discussed in many Western countries where ethnic minorities are the demographic component that is growing the fastest (Jamal 2005; Schwartz et al. 2010).

The consumption patterns of immigrant ethnic-minority consumers have been extensively researched using an acculturation framework (Askegaard, Arnould & Kjeldgaard, 2005; Jamal et al. 2015; Pealoza 1994).

According to Kizgin, Jamal, and Richard (2017) and Schwartz et al. (2010), enculturation is the process of learning one’s own culture, whereas acculturation is the culture change that happens as a result of contact with individuals, communities, and environments that are culturally diverse.

These consumers of ethnic minorities navigate multiple identities while engaging with host, local, and global consumption cultures (Askegaard et al. 2005; Jamal 2003). While doing so, they come into contact with a range of cultural change agents that affect the results of their acculturation, specifically the extent to which they integrate into the society in which they live or maintain their original cultural values and customs.

Social media has developed into a substantial and effective instrument for promoting and encouraging events and interactions among peers, clients, and organizations that traverse time and geographic boundaries, claim a number of studies (Erkan & Evans, 2016; Jin, 2012).

A variety of online communication platforms, such as social interaction (e.g., Twitter, Facebook), content neighborhoods, and multimedia platforms (YouTube, Instagram), enable the connection, establishment, and maintenance of social and professional relationships through the sharing of ideas and opinions (Alalwan, Rana, Dwivedi, & Algharabat 2017; Alryalat, Rana & Dwivedi. 2017; Ellison and Boyd 2013).

The process by which persons from different cultures acquire the knowledge and abilities required to take part in buyer habits in one culture is known as consumer acculturation. The process of becoming acclimated to a new culture. According to Pealoza (1994), these lessons for immigrants include how to use and pay for goods and services in a foreign country as well as the definitions they give to other people and themselves.

Online communities, like families and friends, schools, churches, and the media, play critical roles in the consumer-acculturation process by assisting people in learning about the new culture (Pealoza, 1994).

Like other forms of technology, social media can encourage societal change and changes to how businesses operate. “The Internet connects people from most parts of the world, enabling them to interact and communicate with one another, learn about and support a range of phenomena, and promote their ideas throughout society,” in accordance with Kapoor et al. (2017).

Muhammad, Dey, and Weerakkody’s (2017) results that social considerations, specifically social contact, are a key motivating factor behind consumer use of social media are consistent with this. Rolls et al. (2016) claim that social media creates new opportunities for information exchange that can be significant accelerators for social learning, networking, and the growth of symbiotic community relationships.

According to research by Sparks et al. (2013), “language, lexical expression, and style can have an impact on how social bonds and relationships develop, which in turn can have a big impact on how customers behave” (Goh et al. 2013; Laroche, Habibi, & Richard 2013). These elements have also been found to be important for successful social media interaction.

Acculturation literature has investigated how social media affects the formation of group identities. When minorities frequently interact with other cultures via social media, they can develop and reinforce a variety of ethnicities in an online space (Lindridge, Henderson, & Ekpo, 2015).

According to academic research (Jamal 2003), ethnicity in the contemporary marketplace is comparable to bricolage, in which a consumer creates his or her own self-identity using elements taken from many cultural representations and practices.

Because of this, we argue that social media platforms will likely act as bicultural brokers and mediators, encouraging minority users to showcase who they are and engage in representation of oneself (Jafari and Visconti 2015).

Richey, Gonibeed, and Ravishankar (2017) “offer a corroborating viewpoint, arguing that social media self-presentations are comparable to post-modern performances in which the traditional distinctions between performer and audience are purposely dissolved.

Therefore, social media is an acculturation tool that is influenced by a range of cultural viewpoints” (Forbush and Foucault-Welles 2016). These viewpoints add up to form an identity pattern for an entire generations of people.

NEW MEDIA AND IDENTITY CONSTRUCTION
The importance of social media platforms in our lives is growing as more people share details of their daily life on them. They also portray a variety of facets of our position in real-world and online social interactions (Gunduz, 2017).

These two factors have an impact on how people act in social circumstances. ‘The Social Network is getting more and more significant in today’s world and has a bigger impact on society than traditional media. Social media encourages identity exploration, expression, and other inherent human traits (Gunduz, 2017).

Online communities and the conversations they have with one another are driven by the real-world organizations that provide names for different industries. If you want to understand how individuals interact on social media, it’s essential to appreciate agency motivations.

They help people interact and connect with others, participate in the activities they want, and present themselves to others in the way they want to be seen.’ Online communication is possible using either a real name or a screen name, and users are allowed to open as many accounts as they like.

In describing how the new media may create reality, Gunduz (2017) states that:
Online access provides drastically superior opportunities than previous communication technologies, leading to the fact that modern-day communication environments are defined as new media.

Contents created by people and sharing of these contents, rapid dissemination and adoption of social media have created a social dimension to modern-day communication platforms Social communication platforms include communication and interaction that are established among users via online platforms.

Due to the fact that social communication platforms enable users to transfer images, videos and information, all users can access all contents which they want to reach. Contents created by professional users enable non-professional users to create and share contents thanks to social communication platforms.

Social communication platforms or social networks allow people to share their photographs and events with friends and to follow profiles and events of their friends by creating a digital identity (p.86).
This means that consistent social media usage among citizens can create an online identity which has been tagged as netizens with unique cultures of constant online presence and dependence.

This identity can sometimes make individuals detached from their immediate environment and family to a new distant and online family.

CONCLUSION
In the past few decades, social media, a phenomenon neither connected to or restricted to a particular communication technology, has been pervasive worldwide with effects ranging from the local to the global.

We have discussed some of the advantages and applications of social media as well as the ways in which it affects people. Analyses on emigration, marriages and relationships, marginalised persons and groups, politics, interactions between individuals, emotions, observation, defiance and disagreement, transgender activities, and disinformation and radicalism are a few examples of the areas the social media can affect people.

As the internet environment allows for the establishment of new relationships across time and location, we have also demonstrated how social media are culturally located. internet interactions are also influenced when people are offline and all these processes cumulatively affect culture.

The identities created on the social media have the potential of altering the everyday culture of the Nigerian society or any other society. This is because the society is filled with young people who constantly engage in social media interactions for both productive and other reasons making it a constant point of contact for daily actions and decisions.

This interface with new media platforms using social media as a focus have a great tendency to alter or refine culture. It is therefore recommended that social media contents should be refined and censored to trim out contents that are harmful to our cultural perspectives such as bad dressing, drug abuse.

The need for creative use of social media for cultural engineering should be emphasized in many for a and educational systems.

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