On 18th May 2012, Facebook became a public listed company and
its stock has begun trading on the Nasdaq Stock Market. Facebook priced its IPO
at US$38 per share and valued the company at US$104 billion or RM325 billion. This
value is even higher than Yahoo, eBay and Groupon combined. If this figure does
not impressed you imagine this; with over 900 million users, if Facebook is a
country, it would be the third largest country in the world after India and
China. According to The Star, Facebook users in Malaysia alone reached 12
million last year. The top five Social Media channels in Malaysia according to
Burson-Marsteller in 2011 are Facebook, Blogspot, Wordpress, Twitter and
Metacafe with Facebook represents 75.5% of users reach.
Facebook heralded a new era of the media hence the Social Media. It
represents a new way of disseminating information and content sharing. The
interaction of the traditional media e.g.; Television, Radio, Newsprint have
always been a one way interaction with the public being at the receiving end.
Interactions can be done through this media but not on a real-time basis. Even by
allowing interaction, limited freedom are given to the public as the editors or
content managers of these traditional media controls what should be and what
should not be printed or aired. This creates monopoly of content and some
politicians or even Government use this advantage as a tool for propagating
their interests to the public.
However, it is hard to appreciate the new media if you do not know the
origin of the traditional media. Basically, media is known as a method of
communication between people commonly used to distribute news, information and
also views. The need to disseminate information was well established even when
our species was living in caves. This can evidently be seen from the cave
paintings and also stone manuscript. This method then evolved into other forms
of disseminations such as using homing pigeons and manuscripts using bones,
clay tablets and papyrus. As people develop new technology for printing, Newspaper
was then created and circulated to people and it remains as the popular choice
of media for sharing information up until the 21st Century besides
Television and Radio. And then the Internet was born. The main reason behind
the creation of the Internet is basically for connectivity between computer
users. The ARPAnet, considered as the grandfather of World Wide Web was created
in 1969 with the objective of connectivity and data sharing. From that simple
solution, the Internet has now evolved into what is now known as Web 2.0.
