New Media includes Virtual Community, which is a way of explaining a group of people who communicate via the Internet, and Individual ID, which is a way to explain HOW people present themselves online. People are given the opportunity to play around with their identity and the Internet works as a social lab where people can construct and reconstruct themselves. (Turkle, 1995, Life on the screen).The virtual world was a way for people who where geographically isolated to get in touch with others with shared interests. Many early Internet books actually explore this fact. The social networking as we know it, have moved away from this group dynamics and has become an ego centric system that focuses on YOU as an individual.
After the dot com-crash in 2000, Tim O'Reilly & co. created "Web 2.0". This was a new way of thinking about the Internet. The "Web 2.o" is a technical definition describing technologies used to focus on the user experience regarding creation of web services. Features of this new way of looking at the web is among others; Folksonomy, which is a way of organising knowledge in the form of "tags". This way you are in charge of dividing the categories of your post, instead of some authority doing it for you. Making us producers as well as consumers, by letting us create photos, images, videos and text and upload them to the web. Finally, we can share data openly because of open API. The common element here, is community and collaboration. This now had became the Read-Write Web instead of the previous Read-Only Web. 
Moving on into the social media world. This includes elements such as weblogs, or blogs, social network services and content sharing communities. There are some variations in the blog area, such as vlogs, mologs/microblogs (Twitter). Facebook, MySpace, Friendster and livejournal are all examples of social networking sites which have explodes over the last few years. YouTube, Flickr, Deviant etc, are popular sites where people share all kinds of content online.
Regarding people working in the social media field, this has changed over the last 3 years or so. Social Media Experts have become a "tool" for marketing people who wants to teach us how to operate Web 2.0 tools to promote our businesses and/or brands. However, how do these companies make so much money? Well, to get them to perform a service for us, we have to put "stuff" on their sites, so you can say that we are working for them.
The "Attention Economy" and the "Economy of Accumulation" are two concepts concerning our online networking society; Who wants information about us? People send out update emails on themselves (called Eyeballs), but who want these eyeballs, and what can they do with the information? We should ask ourselves how we would react if suddenly writings from our blog was in a newspaper, and we didn't receive any credit for it. In addition, what would we do if pictures we posted on our facebook-page appeared in a fancy magazine? The way we treat our privacy these days is certainly not very good concerning these issues. Maybe we're yelling a bit too loud to get peoples attention and in a way creating this problems for ourselves.
Tutespark
On the subject of online privacy; Who owns the content we put on the web? All the pictures, videos etc that we upload on different networking sites - is that really ours? And finally, who has the right to use these creations?
To figure this out, I went and took a closer look at Facebooks privacy policy;
Since one of the main reasons people are using networking sites such as Facebook is to share content with others, it is critical that they have a valid and reliable policy to prevent misuse of this content. Facebook haven't exactly received praise for their previous work in this area, but after some new adjustments it seems like it's as close to bulletproof as it gets. First of all, you have the option of choosing who you want to display your uploaded/shared content to. Second, Facebook lets you know that ANY content uploaded on this site can be copied and re-shared by other users. So there you go - pretty much anyone that knows how to work a computer can access your photos or other content that you choose to upload and have visible to others. This is why people need to consider what kind of material they include on their personal profiles.
Reference: Facebook Privacy Policy
Content uploaded on YouTube voluntarily may be used by others. In addition, YouTube may use any private information the users disclose to operate/maintain/ improve features of the site.
Reference: YouTube Privacy Notice
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