ANALYSIS OF SOCIAL MEDIA AS NEW DIARIES

JOSE RIZAL MEMORIAL STATE UNIVERSITY

The Premier University in Zamboanga Del Norte
Dipolog Campus, Dipolog City

by
Cotot, Mercy Q.
Odato, Ivy C.
Ponggan, Sheila Mae A.
Introduction

Social media was popularly used during 21St century. Young generations merely engaged

in media and as a matter of fact, it is used mostly or most often in our lives. It plays a significant

role in keeping everyone updated about the various events around the world. Today, we can

check out the latest news and current affairs with just few clicks of mouse or by simply

switching on the radio or television, apart from glancing at the newspaper every morning. Social

Media was also used not just checking events or happenings everyday but we can also

disseminate information towards others.

Social media keeps everyone connected around the world. Even at the farthest country

especially for those who have an internet connection can now communicate to their love ones.

People can see or meet their relatives who are far from them by doing video calls or by having

the messaging app. Some are also meet the love of their life through social media just like

Omegle, Tinder or even in Facebook. It is also use to keep a record every special detail in people

lives. To mention some, people took pictures when it has a birthday celebration, a thanksgiving

and etc. That is why media serves as new diaries to keep data every now and then. Some make

blogs, vlogs and etc. trying to revive the time passed by.

The purpose of the study is to know and analyze how social media has become the new

diaries of the people nowadays. The researchers seek to understand how powerful social media

as it become the most widely used by the people, especially millennial, when it comes to sharing

their own thoughts and feelings.

Definition of Terms

Blogs- a regularly updated website or web page, typically one run by an individual or small
group, that is written in an informal or conversational style.

Diaries- a private thing in which one keeps a daily record of events and experiences.

Facebook- social networking site that makes it easy for you to connect and share with family and
friends online.

Instagram- photo and video-sharing social networking service owned by Facebook, Inc. 

Millennial- people who engage more in social media.

Netizens- user of internet and social media sites.

Social media- Websites and applications that enable users to create and share content or to
participate in social networking.

Twitter- microblogging and social networking service on which users post and interact with
messages known as "tweets".

Vlogs- a personal website or social media account where a person regularly posts short videos.

REVIEW RELATED LITERATURE

Foreign Literature

McCay-Peet and Quan-Haase (2017: 17) said that “Social media are web-based services

that allow individuals, communities, and organizations to collaborate, connect, interact, and build

community by enabling them to create, co-create, modifies, share, and engage with user-

generated content that is easily accessible.” Social media is indeed a helpful virtual tool to

engage frequently to the people across the globe.

In addition, Social Media is a group of Internet-based applications that build on the

ideological and technological foundations of Web 2.0, and that allow the creation and exchange
of User Generated Content. (Kaplan & Haenlein 2010: 61) This definition social media explains

how it helps the communication process, the sharing of information and the socialization of

individuals becomes easier and faster.

Linke (2010) had partners fill out diaries recording the mutual communicative exchanges

and togetherness in media use for one day (Linke 2010: 77–78). The diaries allowed to detect

patterns in the couples’ everyday lives, such as communicative routines and rituals. They

connected the temporal structures of communication patterns throughout a week with certain

media and distinct communication spaces (Hepp, Bozdag and Suna 2011: 168) resulting in a

typology of ‘origin-’, ‘ethno-’ and ‘world-oriented’ migrants (Hepp, Bozdag and Suna 2011:

64).

Lee Humphreys, Cornell University’s Associate Professor in the Department of

Communication at the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences (CALS) recently sat down with

Scott Pesner, Director of Alumni Engagements at CALS, to weigh in on the current impact of

social media usage within the historical context of older communication practices.“When I

started studying mobile technologies, phones looked very different than they do today,” admitted

Humphreys. “However, even seventeen years ago there were concerns about the ways that

mobile phones were making us more narcissistic and ruining face-to-face interactions.”Yet

Humphreys believes that the use of social media isn’t the root of evil, but is relevant to a larger

history about the ways that people use media to connect with one another. In many respects,

social media is a way of documenting everyday life events.“I define media accounting as the

practices that allow us to document our lives, and the world around us, and share it with others,”

Humphreys explains. She gives the example of Twitter, one of the first platforms to offer both a
web and mobile version. Originally, Twitter had an 180-character limit so people could share

tweets via text message, and the platform was often referred to as a micro-blog. Looking back at

the history of blogging, journaling and diary practices, Humphreys sees similarities between how

people are now using Twitter. “I had always thought of diaries as these little notebooks with

locks on them into which you pour your innermost thoughts. This is actually a very modern

notion of diaries.” Throughout most of the 19th century, Humphreys discovered, people would

share their diaries, either sitting down together or mailing back and forth. Friends and family

would write in the margins, creating an element of interactivity. Young women would leave their

homes to get married and send diaries home as a means of maintaining relationships. Diaries

were essentially a social practice of communication.

Jakarta, GIVnews.com (2018). "We now live in an era where almost everything has been

digitalized, including our feelings. This is made possible through social media." Be it a

Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or other social media accounts, almost everyone is on the social

media, especially younger generation. On this, people may have observed an interesting

phenomenon where they start noting and sharing their feelings through these platforms and

hence they are ‘digitally recorded’. This would mean that people no longer use a hardcopy diary

to express feelings. Instead, for some, social media has now become their diary

Carter et al. (2013) collected outcomes of a self-monitoring weight-management

intervention delivered by a smartphone app and compared them to outcomes using website and

paper diaries. The results indicated that participants’ compliance with dietary self-monitoring

was statistically significantly higher in the smartphone group than in the website and paper diary

groups. The compliance effect of mobile-phone-based diary applications increases when

technology-based reminders are used. Participants in the mobile diary with reminders group will

report more viewings than participants using mobile diaries with no reminders (in line with

findings of Palermo et al., 2004; see also Iida et al., 2012). Participants who use mobile diaries

(with reminders) to record their viewing will report more viewings than participants who use a

paper diary (based on findings of Carter et al., 2013).

Mobile applications can also send users reminders to complete their diary, track reporting

in real-time, and even filter out retroactive reporting. Another advantage of the mobile diary

method is its unrestricted physical space requirements compared to paper diaries. Data are even

returned and coded online, in a transparent manner, unlike paper diaries that suffer from

logistical obstacles related to their dispatch to users and subsequent collection from users to

research teams (Alaszewski, 2010); Furthermore, and due to the time that elapses until all diaries

are obtained and coded, data publication may be delayed (Napoli, 2011).

Local Literature

Miguel R. Camus, journalist of Inquirer Philippines, stated in his paper that “The

Philippines again topped the world in terms of social media usage as the number of internet users

in the country hit 67 million people, according to a new report by London, United Kingdom-

based consultancy We Are Social. In its Digital 2018 report, which compiled data from various

third-party sources, We Are Social said Filipinos spent an average of 3 hours and 57 minutes a

day on social media sites, mainly on Facebook. It said there were 67 million accounts on

Facebook in the Philippines, matching the total number of internet users in the county. Another

10 million Filipinos were on Instagram, which is owned by Facebook. The Philippines was ahead

in terms of social media usage in a list of 40 countries. Least interested in social media were the
Japanese, who spent an average of 48 minutes a day updating their Facebook status and posting

pictures on Instagram.” Meaning social media is an effective platform for information

dissemination and engagement of the people. Through social media individuals are able to share,

connect and express their own personal feelings, even if it is private for others to know.

According to Jess Zimmerman (2014) "the new diaries – our Twitter accounts,

Facebook profiles, Snapchats, Vines, Instagrams, Secrets, Whispers and whatever is next –

between wanting to be open and wanting to be safe, between the limited openness and the

complete safety we imagine ... and the openness and safety that exist in reality." Zimmerman

emphasizes the tension of the new media that cause many of the strains that mar our relationship

with internet privacy. Sometimes it’s the tension between people who think they’re talking to

their friends on Twitter and reporters who note that those words are technically public.

SYNTHESIS AND GAPS OF THE STUDY

Researchers of the study found out that since the beginning of social media, humans have

questioned what kind of real it will play in their everyday life. It was hard to predict the extent to

which social networking sites would control their lives. Social media has brought about advances

in research in how humans connect and communicate and can tell so much more about how

humans, as a whole, function. People tend to neglect the traditional way of keeping their own

personal lives from public. Jakarta, GIVnews.com (2018) stated that "We now live in an era

where almost everything has been digitalized, including our feelings. This is made possible

through social media." Which means that because of social media people forgot the so-called

diary, where they can record their personal data privately. People forgot the importance of
keeping their own personal life away from public, away from judgments and criticisms. The

researchers suggests that personal thoughts, feelings or emotion or even the personal data of an

individual should be kept in private for the security and safety of individual from harmful

elements coming from cyberspace.

Based upon the gathered literature, the researchers found that no research is exactly the

same with the topic they had. Other research focused only on the effects of having social media

and advances that social media could give. No one have research about social medias as new

diaries of the netizens.

CONCLUSION

In conclusion, the study revealed how social media serves as the new diaries of the

people, wherein diaries in traditional way should be kept private for it contains personal thoughts

and experiences of an individual. The researchers found out that nowadays people tend to share

publicly their personal emotions through posting on their social media accounts, where they

forgot to think that netizens are able to see and judge it publicly.
REFERENCE

KAPLAN, A. M. & M. HAENLEIN 2010. Users of the world, unite! The challenges and
opportunities of Social Media. Business Horizons 53, 59–68. Retrieved from:
http://julianhopkins.com/how-to-define-social-media-an-academic-summary/

MCCAY-PEET, L. & A. QUAN-HAASE 2017. What is Social Media and What Questions Can
Social Media Research Help Us Answer? In The SAGE Handbook of Social Media
Research Methods (eds) L. Sloan & A. Quan-Haase. ProQuest Ebook Central.retrieved
from: http://julianhopkins.com/how-to-define-social-media-an-academic-summary/

Linke, Christine (2010), Medien im Alltag von Paaren: Eine Studie zur Mediatisierung der
Kommunikation in Paarbeziehungen/Media in Couples’ Everyday Lives: On the
Mediatization of Communication within Couple Relationships, Wiesbaden: VS.

Kaun, Anne (2010), ‘Open-ended online diaries: Capturing life as it is narrated’, International
Journal of Qualitative Methods, 9: 2, 133–48.

Internet sources

https://blog.ecornell.com/social-media-the-modern-day-diary/

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2059799119844442#focusIdbibr27-
2059799119844442

https://business.inquirer.net/246015/ph-world-leader-social-media-usage#ixzz67gAxbE56