Page 144 - Trust in ICT 2017

2 Trust in ICT

One characteristic shared by social media is the capability to reach small or large audiences, for example,
either a blog post or a television show may reach some people or millions of people. The differences of social
media from traditional media is described as follows [24]:
1 Quality: The main challenge posed by contents in social media sites is the fact that the distribution
of quality varies from very high quality to low quality, to sometimes abusive contents.
2 Reach: Social media are more decentralized, less hierarchical, and distinguished by multiple points
of production and utility.

3 Frequency: The number of advertisements is immediately displayed on social media platforms.
4 Accessibility: The social media tools are generally available to the public.
5 Usability: Most social media production requires skills or tools to be open, and anyone can
commonly operate the means of social media production.
6 Immediacy: Social media can be capable of virtually instantaneous responses.
7 Permanence: The contents of social media can be altered almost instantaneously by comments or
editing.
In addition, the features of social media can be classified with the following functional blocks [24]:
– Identity: This block represents the extent to which users reveal their identities in a social media
setting. It includes metadata information such as name, age, gender, profession, location, and also
additional information that portrays users in certain ways.
– Conversations: This block represents the extent to which users communicate with other users.
Many social media sites are designed primarily to facilitate conversations among individuals and
groups. People tweet and blog to meet new like-minded people, to find true love, to build their self-
esteem, or to be on the cutting edge of new ideas or trending topics.
– Sharing: This block represents the extent to which users exchange, distribute, and receive contents.
The term 'social' often implies that exchanges between people are crucial. In many cases, however,
sociality is about the objects that mediate these ties between people.

– Presence: This block represents the extent to which users can know whether other users are
accessible or not. It includes knowing where others are, in the virtual world and/or in the real world,
and whether they are available.
– Relationships: This block represents the extent to which users can be related to other users. Two or
more users have some form of associations that lead them to converse, share objects of sociality,
meet up, or simply just list each other as a friend or fan.

– Reputation: This block represents the extent to which users can identify the standing of others,
including themselves. Reputation can have different meanings on social media platforms. In most
cases, reputation is a matter of trust. Since the current information technologies are not yet good
at determining such highly qualitative criteria, social media sites rely on automatic aggregation of
user-generated information to determine trustworthiness.

– Groups: This block represents the extent to which users can form communities and sub
communities. The more 'social' a network becomes, the bigger the group of friends, followers, and
contacts.
Recently, the new add-on features of social media technologies are investigated as follows:

– (Secret) The users share their feeling and thoughts only inside their own contacts. They do not want
to share without knowing who they are.
– (Snap shot) By using smartphones, mobile social networking services can share photos or videos
with private messages. A series of photos and videos can be composed of a variety of storytelling. A
nice collection of photos can be tagged from others.
– (Voice message) The smartphone is useful to send voice messages as well as texts. Through voice
calls, photos and videos can be shared with others.
– (Dating) People can chat about their mutual feelings on photos and basic information of others.

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