How Technology Impacts Social Learning;

The Role of Social Media in Search Behavior

Daniel J. Pool

October 26th, 2014

Since the creation of Web 2.0, the internet has profoundly changed the way in which
individuals communicate. One major change was the introduction of collaboration and
interaction between users in electronic culture. Specifically the emergence of social media has
altered how web patrons access and search for information online. To better understand how
social media technology has impacted search behavior one must investigate the history of social
media, how it is used, and how it will be used in the future.
One of the newest fads in technology from the past few years has been micro-blogs
(Kaplan & Haelein 2011). It is a form of social media that limits the space an individual can
express an idea in (Romero 2011). Typically allowing for less than 200 characters with an
industry average of 140 (Zilincik, Navrat, & Koskova 2013). The main function is to allow
community members to share, discover, and comment on social trends faster (McDonnell &
Shiri 2010).
Groups are created by an individual subscribing to another allowing for content to be
pushed to the user when it is available (Kaplan & Haelein 2011). This creates a Push-Push-Pull
Communication relationship between users which in turn all become content providers. Though
often utilized for entertainment it has also become a source to learn about the world through
social learning behavior (Jost & Li 2013).
This social learning behavior is popular as it can use a groups combined reasoning
without the asker having to expend their resources for an answer (Jost & Li 2013). It is also
common when community members are unsure what exactly they are looking for and need help
finding the right key word or idea to encompass their thought through an exploratory search
(Zilincik, Navrat, & Koskova 2013). Otherwise they may be asking the question to a select

online community because it is an embarrassing question such as to be related to health (Gold,

Pedrana, Sacks-Davis, Hellard, Chang, Howard, Keogh, Hocking, and Stoove 2013).
Social media has many applications such as Facebook, MySpace, Blogger, Tumblr,
Pinterest, Jaiku, Vine, and Plurk which all allow for interaction however one stands above the
other: Twitter (Kaplan & Haenlein 2011). Twitter is the proto-microblog in that it only allows for
140 characters, creates public broadcasting, and allows for individual lead in-group/out-group
formations based on user choice. It allows for rapid content sharing between users (Gold et al.
2011) and the ability to enhance content with user generated tags (McDonnell & Shiri 2010).
The taxonomy of a typical web search includes three major concepts; navigational,
informational, and transactional ((McDonnell & Shiri 2010). Navigational refers to content
reaching a user display area. Informational refers the reason the information is presented to the
user. Transactional is the activity performed in response to that information. In Twitter this all
happens very fast (in the time it takes to swipe up or down a news feed). The information is so
fragmented it rarely means much allow but rather requires knowledge of the user, previous
tweets, and general news (Kaplan & Haenlein 2011). This is what is called ambient awareness
or content that requires more than just the information packet (a tweet in this case) allow to be
judged.
A tweet is a container of information that presents limited amounts of sentences, images,
videos, or website links (Kaplan & Haenlein 2011). It can be directed at a single individual,
several individuals, everyone using the service, or be tagged with keywords. This metadata is
archived and can be searched for latter or posted to other sites (Zilincik, Navrat, & Koskova
2013).

Social media technology impacts information search behavior by allowing users to find
information tailored for their needs and interests (Gold et al. 2011). Social media also helps
institutions like libraries see in real time how much of an impact their services were having as
well as make direct personal connections with users (Romero 2011). Social media searching can
also have practical effects on society itself.
In 2007 when an author named Michael Jackson passed away, the number of search
queries being made to Google triggered safety protocols reserved for brute-force cyber-attacks
(Kaplan & Haenlein 2011). Before the traditional information search engine could recover
thousands of users had flocked to Twitter to exchange the fact that it had not been the singer and
performer.
Two years later however when Michael Jackson the performer did pass away, Twitter
again became the active hub for information sharing (Kaplan & Haenlein 2011). It is projected
that roughly a quarter of all exchanges via the social media platform that day included a
reference to the celebrity. An impressive 100,000 tweets per hour were exchanged only minutes
after the announcement.
In more socially impacting events, when Iran held an election in 2009, the president,
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, attempted to silence online protesters by blocking mobile phone
communication (Kaplan & Haenlein 2011). The state also blocked online content providers
Facebook and Youtube in hopes of keeping bad press out of the public eyes. The resulting surge
of users to Twitter resulted in the social media company holding off updates and maintenance in
order to help facilitate content sharing and social information seeking.

The resulting impact on society of this kind of personalized social media then is huge
(Gold et al. 2011). It has the potential to reach vast numbers of users with targeted personally
tailored information.
The future of Twitter is becoming even more personal (McDonnell & Shiri 2011). In the
future services will create search profiles consisting of relevant search terms, viewed content,
social circles, and browsing behavior to build profiles of the user to better navigate them to
useful content. With this extra information, social media systems will also have to learn how to
tell content objects apart from people or groups. In this way it can discern what would be more
applicable to a users search.
The reason the technology will move this way is because users are becoming more
proficient in what information they want (McDonnell & Shiri 2011). In the future then Twitter
will have to anticipate the needs of the user. A search will be equal parts seeking and discovering
then as the system finds relevant information the user may not have actively looked for.
Information in the future will also be more layered (McDonnell & Shiri 2011).
Information in the future could be described as Woogle or a Wiki (information about a topic)
combined with a Google (results regarding a topic) to produce heavily contextualized
information to the user. This will make provide users with more background information about
their results beyond keywords or hashtags. This is because users typically do not take advantage
of advanced search features that could greatly aid their query.
In conclusion, social media (or microblog) is an important technology for the modern
information user. Social searching behavior then is increasingly important tool to help diffuse
knowledge through a population. The leading microblog is Twitter that allows for short

exchanges between users and the addition of metadata. Users typically use this service to
facilitate exploratory searches. In the future the internet will associate more metadata and create
personalized profiles of users to assist in making more targeted searches for the user. Social
media has affected information searching behavior by connecting users at unprecedented
volumes to share news, data, and ideas far faster than traditional means.

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