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Course: Archived AP CSP content > Unit 2
Lesson 1: Archived Communication, collaboration, and crowdsourcingEmail, SMS, and social media
In the 1950s, people only had a few options for communicating with each other over long distances: a telephone call, a telegram, or a mailed letter.
But then computers, the Internet, and mobile phones happened. Nowadays, we can send an email, write a short text message, post on social media, or use any one of many popular messaging apps. Thanks to all those options, we can choose the communication medium that's best for our message's audience and purpose.
Whatever we choose, our messages arrive nearly instantaneously at their destination: popping up in email inboxes, triggering push notifications on phones, or appearing in social media feeds.
The best part? Everything's asynchronous, so we don't actually need to drop everything and reply immediately. We can, if we want, but we can also take our time.
Let's explore email, SMS, and social media in more depth, and consider the differences in how they enable communication and information dissemination.
QWERTYUIOPThat was the contents of the first email ever sent, back in 1971.
By the 1980s, the email protocol was standardized and included features like replying, forwarding, CCing, and BCCing.
Companies soon realized the consumer appeal of email and developed easy-to-use webmail clients, like Hotmail in 1996, Yahoo Mail in 1997, and Gmail in 2004.
430 billion emails were sent every day in May 2019.
Email started off as a one-to-one communication medium, but is increasingly used for announcements, newsletters, and mailing lists.
Unfortunately, the biggest use of email is the one that email receivers don't want: spam! One research group estimates that as much as 85% of all email is spam. Sometimes spam mail is just advertising for products that we don't want—the junk mail of the Internet—but often times spam mail is more sinister, containing phishing attempts and malware attachments. An unaware email user might accidentally reveal their private information or infect their machine, simply by reacting to an email.
Like many technologies, email can be used for good, to give people around the world a way to communicate at nearly the speed of light, but it can also be used for bad, to compromise the privacy and security of email users.
🤔 Do you use email with friends, family, classmates, or coworkers? What's your favorite kind of email to receive? Do you ever feel overwhelmed by email?
SMS
Merry ChristmasThat was the first SMS message, sent in December 1992 from a software developer in the United Kingdom.
SMS was designed as a "short message service" between mobile phones. The messages needed to be short because mobile phone networks had constrained bandwidth at the time. A German engineer proposed the 160 character limit, justifying it based on the average length of postcard messages and telegrams.
The 160 character limit still holds today, but now many mobile phones make it seem like there is no longer a limit by splitting long messages into multiple pieces and stitching them back together again.
SMS learned a few new tricks too: SMS messages can be sent to multiple recipients and include images. Still, compared to email, it's fairly limited in its functionality.
Despite its limitations, SMS is remarkably popular. In the early 2000s, SMS usage shot up in countries without reliable Internet service, since SMS travels over the cellular networks.
Now that many more countries do have high-speed wireless Internet, SMS is competing with messaging apps like WhatsApp and WeChat. Even so, it remains a common form of messaging since it works between any two phones on any network; no app download needed!
Just like email, SMS was originally intended for one-to-one communication, but it's now used as a way for governments and businesses to broadcast messages to many phones at once.
A government agency can send SMS messages to subscribed residents with alerts about missing persons
Similarly (though not quite as life-saving!), businesses can send SMS messages to customers to entice them with promotions. Mobile phone users are a captive audience; the average US smartphone user touches their phones more than 2,000 times a day
🤔 What messaging app do you use? Do you prefer to communicate with friends by texting, calling, or some other medium? How has text-based communication changed your social interactions?
Social media
On March 21, 2006, Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey wrote that as the first tweet. It amassed a huge number of retweets and likes in the years since.
The team behind Twitter originally envisioned the service as a way to share status updates with anyone interested in your updates. You could "follow" other Twitter accounts, but they didn't have to follow you back.
That asymmetry leads to a social graph with multiple types of relationships between users:
Twitter was asymmetric from the beginning, but once other social networks saw the success of that model, many added on follow-like features. Now you can be a fan on Facebook, follow on Instagram, or subscribe on YouTube.
Lots of people still use social media primarily as a way to connect with their friends and family, but increasingly, people are using social media as a way to spread and consume information across wider networks.
Information can easily "go viral" on social media, since it's so easy to write a post and even easier to click a button to share a post with your network.
In May 2016, one woman streamed a live video to her Facebook fans where she gleefully unboxed and wore a Chewbacca mask. Within a week, the video had over 100 million views and she was invited to meet the Chewbacca actor himself.
The majority of social network users have a small number of followers, but it only takes a few super-connected users for a post to go viral.
We don't use social media just for entertainment purposes; in 2018, the majority of Americans read news on social media. In fact, more Americans now get their news from social media than from print newspapers.
At the same time, 57% of US social media users expect news on social media to be largely inaccurate, and Europeans trust social media less than any other news source.
Why does inaccurate news spread so easily on social media? Researchers think it's due to information overload; social media users can scroll through hundreds of posts in a short period of time, and there's just too much information for them to reason about.
Researchers are also concerned about "echo chambers". On social media, people tend to be connected to people with similar ideologies and thus are more likely to see content that aligns with their beliefs. They're also less likely to apply a rigorous accuracy check to that ideologically aligned content, so they are more apt to share it.
This visualization shows two disparate echo chambers on Twitter during the Brexit debate, an UK referendum which supported UK leaving the EU.
Social media has the potential to enable the free flowing of ideas between many different people, but yet the ideas don't seem to be flowing between groups with opposing beliefs. If we stay within our echo chambers on social media, we may never get the chance to understand other perspectives and have our own beliefs challenged.
🤔 Services like Facebook and Twitter are starting to investigate ways to combat the potentially harmful effects of social media. Besides inaccurate news, what other harmful effects might there be? What benefits do you personally derive from social media? What are ways that you can use social media responsibly?