Popular Media and Society

COM - 209 – 502

The Cocoon Effect of new media

Done by: Shamma Abdulla Al Falasi

ID: 200705489

Under the supervision of: Mrs. Cathy Strong

The life style in each community usually comes from the ideology and the common

values in that society, in addition to how they look to the human members of the community

and how they define the concept of “humanity”.

Recently, the new media played a fundamental role in the change or the development of

this view as the media in the contemporary world has become a competitor of the family in

the path of education and guidance for the individuals. From this point, we can guess that

mass media are increasingly serving the needs of more specialized audiences. The common

mass media that we are all familiar to are TV networks, Magazines, Radio stations. Those

mass media are the best examples of the trend, with their highly targeted audience. Moreover,

technology is increasingly directing individuals, day after day, toward more and more various

content of selective options, that varies between web pages like Facebook, and other audio

devices like TiVo and iPod.

One important example of the new media controlling individuals’ life is the social

networking. It is based on a certain structures that allow people to both express their

individuality and meet people with similar interests. This structure includes having profiles,

friends, blog posts, widgets, and usually something unique to that particular social

networking website. This encourages individuals to get an access to a place where they can

make new society, which leads to “human cocooning”.

The thing that we all can agree about is that if this trend continues directing peoples’

social actions it will shift from being something good to a thing that affect the individuals

negatively. This phenomenon has been labeled the “cocoon effect” by sociologists. As it is

mentioned in the Textbook, from the sociologists’ perspective, this term refers to the process

The Cocoon Effect of new mediaDoes new style of media cause people to be recluse, hermits because they don’t need

to socialize with others?

“whereby people surrounded themselves with only the political and social information that

they find comforting, appealing, or acceptable”.

Every phenomenon has advantages and disadvantages, as the social networking and the

internet surfing have. Some of the advantages are that it motivates people to LIME (Learn /

Influence / Meet / Entertain), and it is makes the world a small village, moreover, it increases

the interaction across culture, in addition to that it is an important source of knowledge.

However, it has lots of disadvantages, such as, inappropriate language, nudity, sexually

provocative images, some social networking services allow people to view profiles without

logging on. And the most important disadvantage is that is helps to isolate some individuals

from their families and friends.

According to the Pew Internet and American Life Project “Social Isolation and New

Technology”, “We found that the extent of social isolation has hardly changed since 1985,

contrary to concerns that the prevalence of severe isolation has tripled since then, 6% of the

adult population has no one with whom they can discuss important matters or who they

consider to be “especially significant” in their life”.

So, by depending totally on the mass media devices, people are going to put themselves

into an informational cocoon, to entertain themselves with what they see suitable, and escape

from the uncertainty of modern life. Generally, cocooning affect the individual to be isolated

from society, and live with the total dependence on the devices, that – on the individual’s

opinion – can be his family, friends, and society.

Facts and statistics:

References:

The graph on the left demonstrates the gender distribution for some social

networks, like my space.

According to Comscore, and based on the numbers of unique worldwide visitors, these are the top five social media sites of 2008:

Blogger: 222 million visitors

Facebook: 200 million visitors

MySpace:126 million visitors

Wordpress:114 million visitors

Windows Live Spaces: 87 million visitors

http://socialnetworking.lovetoknow.com/Facts_on_Social_Media

• http://arstechnica.com/old/content/2007/07/report-south-korea-tops-in-social-network-us-fifth.ars

• http://www.netaddiction.com/

• http://visualrevenue.com/blog/2007/08/online-social-network-participation.html

• http://www.desishades.com/images/socialnetworking3.jpg

• http://www.smemon.com/social-networking-advantages-and-disadvantages/

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lYoAwfh4QOU

• http://pipl.com/statistics/social-networks/5-facts/

• http://www.bradbaldwin.com/2007/10/24/world-wide-social-networking-users-by-location/