Vincent started his presentation by covering what Social Media is : web 2.0, social networking, user-generated content, the prosumer, attention economy, flattening time and space.

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The Internet has become an integral part of our lives and these two articles just shows how it truly affects us.

The first article I want to highlight is one found on News24 about the Internet shaking up the US election. This article talks about how “Voter-generated content” is credited with helping Senator Barack Obama secure the Democratic presidential nomination and how shared Videos on YouTube and blogs were used to scrutinise US presidential election candidates. Very interesting. “Voter-generated content” is a new term for me, but probably taken from “user-generated content” or UGC which refers to various kinds of media content, publicly available, that are produced by end-users. Anyone who is blogging or posts videos or pictures, generate content. If major search engines and now even governments use this as an important factor to evaluate and produce results, then it sure is important and becoming a way of life and the way of the future.

The second came from another article on News24 about how missing kids were found via Facebook. Missing Children SA launched a Facebook group at the beginning of the year and posted posters of missing kids onto the group page. Notices were sent to some 1 118 members (at the time of the article, now at 1 744 members) and at least three children have been found because of the Facebook group. The group founder, Pieter Boshoff, says that “This group really makes a difference, as the group grows bigger the chance of finding more kids will also grow”. Let’s hope so. As of February 2008, Facebook had about 734 000 South African members and it is still growing.

So, there you go. Perhaps two articles alone is not so convincing for an argument, but you cannot argue that technology is fast changing the way we move forward into the future and whether you like it or not, the Internet will (I believe has already) become infused into our everyday lives.