Social media and health promotion

Social media is any networked ICT tool or platform that derives its content and principal value from user engagement and permits those users to interact with that content as part of a larger movement in communications organized under Web 2.0 (7,8). The ability to comment, share, contribute to and remix existing content is what distinguishes social media from other forms such as television, print, radio and early websites. Social media shifts health communication messaging from one-to-many to include one-toone and many-to-many simultaneously, while offering novel means to reach people wherever they are located in real time. Unlike previous generations of the Web, social media doesn’t require its users to have an understanding of how their tools work or programming languages to generate content and share it. Although social media has been around since 2004, the widespread availability of mobile Internet-enabled devices using Apple’s iOS (iPhone), or Android or Blackberry systems, has put it in reach of people across the globe. Social media users are akin to artists, creating, reworking and sharing content instead of passively ‘consuming’ it. Social media may be new, but its manifestation was presaged through ideas introduced in the 1960s by Marshall McLuhan and members of the Toronto School of Communications group of scholars (9). School member and anthropologist Edmund Snow Carpenter (10) noted how the following ‘rules’ of communication used in traditional journalism ran contrary to what new media offered: