Essay Sample on Social Media: The Most Preferred Choice for Customer Care

Introduction

The use of social media is vast and beyond what most people think of just sharing memes, finding the latest trending pop culture, and finding entertaining videos. Social media is one of the primary forms of communication, and in the lasted rankings, it came at the top as the most preferred choice of customer care. The government is not left behind in the use of social media for communication. Ease of communication is one of the renowned benefits that come along the use of Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. Through social media, it becomes very convenient for the people to air out their opinions to the government and for the government to listen to them. It could be a state addressing the citizens about a new decree they need to be aware of, or the use of YouTube by the U.S to share a video of a press briefing, communication between citizens and the government has been made easier by the use of social media. The process of using social media has become relatively convenient compared to how it was five years ago, but it is still a relatively new process for the citizens. Therefore, a lot of room still exists for improvement.

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The above mentioned social media platforms can be used both by the governed and the government in expressing their views and opinions on issues affecting their society. Twitter and other social media platforms have recently been in use by interviewers as a means of getting citizens to ask their leaders questions on certain policies and decisions of their administrations. It is worth concluding that despite the limited access to social media, the avenue can still be used both by the government and the citizens to reach a consensus on the issues affecting the society and also to maintain peace. Rienstra (2011) supports this by stating that social media has come up as a powerful tool for development, adding to telecommunication influence as drivers of democratic and economic change.

Despite some parts of the world having limited access to the internet, and limited freedom of information and expression, the developing world is increasingly accessing social networking websites through mobile phones. Iran is one of those countries that have occasionally denied its citizens the freedom of communication and information, especially during times of crisis like the just concluded one. However, in states that have given their citizens the freedom to access the internet and information, ideas are now spreading faster, leading to the pushed boundaries of freedom of expansion and opening up new opportunities for reform and change (Lim, Sun, Tabea & Brenda 2148). In Iran, there is great potential in social media and the internet. If its full usage is allowed regardless of the political and economic situation, it can be a powerful catalyst for democratization.

The Role of the Social Media in Sustaining Democratic Governance

Due to the rise of new social media platforms in the first decade of the 21st century, there have been many transformations in how people share information and communicate (Bertot, Carlo, Paul & Derek 37). However, there are still high levels of controversy in political processes in the effects of social media platforms emergence such as Twitter, Facebook, or YouTube, and other online discussions for and blogging sites. Political ideology itself seems to drive much discourse, and not by academic inquiry. People have a powerful will of believing that these social media platforms are making political processes more democratic, though there is no enough evidence to support this.

To one end is a group of famous activists who believe and seek to propagate the idea that most of the political changes like those that occurred in the Middle East since 2010 were as a result of social media influence and are absolute "Facebook Revolution." Contrary to that, there is a group of people who view the government and large private-sector corporations to use the internet and social media increasingly as a means of ever-increasing control and surveillance over citizens. There is also argument and assumption, on the other hand, that there is an elective affinity in the widespread use of the internet for social networking, video-sharing, blogging, and tweeting, with its participatory democracy. However, they further make suggestions that such optimistic claims for social media political benefit sharply contrast too much of mainstream academic discourse surrounding the projections of digital democratic governance (Bertot et al., 32).

Social Media and Liminality Concept

Cultural anthropologist Victor Turner theoretically guides the investigation through his work on rites of passages and social structure, deriving to be specific, on the concept of liminality - the "betwixt and between" individuals states in the middle of a passage of rite; and communitas, a democratic community spirit associated with liminality (Fassihi, Farnaz & Gladstone 4).

The concept of liminality reintroduced by Victor Turner into anthropology was a significant contribution to the discourse. Liminality aims at understanding cultures based on disorder and dynamism, and society is seen as a dynamic and dialectic process and not as a thing. According to Turner, the concept of culture is whereby there is a struggle between anti-structure and structure (359). On the other hand, it is the idea of communitas, which is also brought by Turner. Communitas is a state brought about by liminality, and which according to him, is a society which relatively has no structure, and whose basis is on solidarity and equality relations, and is opposed to the normative social structure (360). In line with the recent happenings or performance in Iran, there is a lot that can be derived and explained using the concepts of communitas and liminality.

The liminality pedagogics represents a condemnation of two separation types from communitas generic bond (Turner 365). The first kind of separation is only acting is based on the rights conferred to you by the authority of rule in the social structure. The second one is where it follows their psychological urges instead of their fellows. In most kinds of liminality, there is a mystical character that is assigned human kindness sentiment, and this transition stage in most cultures is brought jointly in touch with beliefs in the punitive and protective powers of the authorities (Turner 365). In the Iranian case, the United States, through the Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, has acted in the place of the protective power, showing human kindness by asking the Iranians to continue sending more photos and videos of the happenings in their state. This gives them the hope that the U.S would take action since their government has turned wild on them through the use of forces to humiliate those fighting for their rights.

Amnesty International is also at the forefront of fighting or human rights, and Iran is not left behind in such fights. The organization has produced reports indicating that over 140 people were killed in the demonstrations, and the killings were majorly from firearms by the government security agencies (Fassihi & Gladstone 2). However, officials have criticized the figure claiming they are speculative and that the number of those who have been killed in the demonstrations are at least 218.

Liminality, News, and Subjectivity

On a primary level, online networked structures make ambient, usually-on spaces where hybrid forms of news making take location. These spaces are often facilitated through the use of procedures of mobile denationalization. Lately, privatized mobility, via technologies that find the money for customers (mobile) autonomy in deciding on how and where from they connect with the rest of the world (Fassihi et al., 4). On a secondary level, these areas facilitate social conversations that produce user-generated arguments on what's information, or how a particular story may take the form of news. For instance, studies and anecdotal proof advise that systems like Reddit, Twitter, and a ramification of blog and microblog facilities preserve collaborative co-creation, storytelling, and curation of information content (Lim et al., 2148).

These collective and pluralized produced news feeds, generated via citizens committing unbiased or coordinated acts of journalism, present a significant opportunity to the dominant information economy. Social information climates like Digg, Reddit, and Twitter, in particular, generate collective news intelligence through a blend of social practices that encompass voting, filtering, and commenting on the news (Fassihi et al., 4). They generate information streams that blend cursory references to the news with deeply non-public and by and large affective reactions to how this news is covered. Resulting news streams are generated through socially infused conventions that permit engagement through broadcasting, but additionally via a ramification of practices that derived out of the way human beings pay interest, or "listen" to the news.

Looking at the Iranian Riots Case

In the case of Iran protests, the issue of the internet and social media has been at the forefront affected both by the government and the international community. Due to the high levels of interests and the potentials that the internet and social media have in spreading the news, the Iranian government made it its first move to shut down all the internet access in the country to avoid any possible sharing of information about the riots by the Iranians. The government well knows the aims of this, but speculatively, this was either to avoid further spread of chaos news that could result in more fights or a means by the government to suppress its people by preventing them from sharing information (Lim et al., 2148). Either way, there is no justice in denying the citizens their right to information or communication, like the Iranian government did it in the recent past.

The use of social media in governance can either be positive or negative. Positive uses of social media in government include the sharing of information by the government to the citizens or vice versa (Bertot et al., 39). However, the government may also have a monopoly over the use of the internet and social media hence limiting its citizens from accessing them in cases of crisis like the one that occurs in Iran. The motive was ill, and this is evident from the misappropriation of the number of people killed by the armed forces during the riots. For instance, the reports produced by Coroner indicated that those killed during the riots were at least 218, with at least 7,000 arrested, and 1,900 people injured (Fassihi & Gladstone 2). That is against the figures stated by the government agency that claimed that only 140 people were killed in the demonstrations.

Conclusion

The concept of liminality in our society has become more than simple. We get ourselves into a liminal space every time we are using the internet or watching television. Mass media create rituals in functions of events occurring in the country, and the ritualized ceremonial comes from the politics, sports, or education industries. In the past years, journalists from various countries have been able to capture the events in different countries and notice the entire nation on how history is written. During the 2017 presidential elections in Iran, the media was there to capture every bit of the events, and with the help of the internet, presented the events that were at the polls.

On November 15, 2019, the government of Iran increased the prices of gas by 200%. People took to the streets to riot over this, but the government shut down the internet and media houses, disabling the broadcasting of such riots. It resulted in fear that made thos...